YouTube’s Making it Easier for Creators to Turn Longer Content into Shorts

Scientists are also beginning to recognize the power of video for documenting experiments, communicating with fellow scientists, and reaching out to the general public, as Maxine Clarke observes in Video as a tool for science communication. As the manager of a university digital media lab, I’ve encountered few faculty members who want to produce their own videos, although some scientists have borrowed camcorders to capture experimental data. But the realist in me (who is much less fun than the dreamer in me) wonders if this requirement may deter some people from submitting conference proposals, since they may lack the skills, time and resources necessary to put together a short video. Video abstracts would also serve those who can’t attend conferences. It’ll only show up in the Create menu if you’re viewing a video you uploaded. It’ll let creators select up to 60 seconds from one of their videos and bring the clip into the Shorts editor, right from the YouTube app on iOS or Android.

As TechCrunch notes, the company has also been padding out its library by converting existing videos to Shorts, as long as they were filmed vertically and under 60 seconds long. Unlike other tools like Cut, which lets you use five seconds from a longer video in a Short, or Clips, which can be converted into Shorts, the Edit into a Short tool can’t be used on other users’ uploads. From there, they can add things like text, filters, as well as additional videos shot with the Shorts camera or pulled from their photo library. While it probably won’t completely replace more traditional video editing software when it comes to creating Shorts (like in an instance where a creator wants to splice together multiple clips from the same video), it could encourage creators to take a look at their back catalog and see if there’s anything that would work well as a Short. YouTube’s post says the Edit into a Short tool will “allow you to bring fresh life to your classic content” and that access to it is currently rolling out. YouTube has put a lot of focus on Shorts since it started rolling out the feature in 2020. It’s tried to incentivize creators to use the format by setting up a fund that paid creators if they uploaded Shorts.

Since many of the posters and demos will likely focus on GIS Maps, mashups, geographic visualizations, and the like, video would represent dynamic, visual media much more effectively than a textual description would. In an announcement post for the feature, YouTube says that the finished Short will link to the full video it was clipped from, which could help make Shorts an ideal promotional tool for the creator’s longer content - a key incentive for them to dive in while YouTube continues testing monetization options for the feature. YouTube is trying to make it even easier for creators to turn their longer videos into Shorts formatted for the platform's TikTok competitor, by adding a new “Edit into a Short” tool to its iOS and Android app. Perhaps I’m being too skeptical; the HASTAC folks certainly know the community of likely presenters better than I, and I would bet that many digital humanities folks would be adept at producing videos. HASTAC II, which focuses on “techno-travels,” includes an intriguing requirement in its CFP: “In addition to filling out an application, participants will be required to make a two minute video of their proposal, upload it to YouTube and tag the YouTube video with ‘HASTAC2008.’” Wow!

For the presenters, video shorts HASTAC’s requirement poses a thrilling challenge: how to express complex ideas in a two-minute video. Indeed, I hope that HASTAC ’s requirement will stimulate more humanities scholars to experiment with video. In disciplines such as art history, film and media studies, and cultural anthropology, video would allow scholars to incorporate visual evidence into their work and explore ideas dynamically. We need more models for multimedia scholarship, as well as more motivation for scholars to produce it. Although it seems that most academic web videos take the form of lectures, some scholars are using video to share research data or develop new approaches to making scholarly arguments. Now comes a new model for using video in scholarship: the YouTube conference abstract. If a viewer enjoys a Short created with this tool, they wouldn’t have to go to the creator’s channel and search around for the full video. Perhaps the most prominent example of a scholarly digital video is Michael Wesch’s The Machine is Us/ing Us, which has been viewed over 4.3 million times and demonstrates the impact that a researcher can have by disseminating work through YouTube. Last month, YouTube said that over 1.5 billion people watched Shorts each month. This content w as c᠎reated  by GSA Conte nt Gener​ator　Demover si᠎on.

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