Shorts Creator

The Shorts Creator reframes landscape clips into mobile-first 9:16 videos. Static face-aware cropping samples the clip and keeps the primary speaker in frame, while falling back safely to a centered crop when no face is found. Outputs are 1080×1920 H.264 files stored in your library as shorts, ready for YouTube Shorts, TikTok, or a manual download.

Horizontal VODs waste most of a phone screen. A naive center crop often chops the speaker in half; letterboxing leaves black bars that platforms punish. Shorts Creator is the step after clipping: take a ranked highlight and make it look native on a vertical feed without opening a desktop NLE.

How it works

Pick a clip or download, choose caption style (bold, minimal, or karaoke), font size, and vertical caption position. Optionally add a hook headline (up to 120 characters), mask profanity in the burned-in captions, and enable face-aware crop. The worker downloads the source (or hits the local source cache), builds an ASS subtitle file with word-level pop-in and karaoke highlight, burns captions with FFmpeg, and uploads the result.

Face detection runs in an isolated subprocess so a native crash cannot take the worker down. It samples sparse frames, takes the median face center, and builds a static crop — not a jittery tracking box. If you need the original aspect ratio, that option letterboxes instead of cropping.

Free-tier outputs can be watermarked at enqueue time. Shorts honor that flag; you will not get a second watermark if the source clip is already marked watermarked.

What you get

• 9:16 conversion with optional face-aware static framing
• Top-centered hook headlines with automatic wrapping
• Word-level caption burn-in with optional profanity masking
• Outputs saved to your library as shorts
• Natural next step after AI clipping

Best with

Start from Clip Generator highlights, then publish via Automation. Use the Trimmer first if the clip still has dead air on either side.

FAQ

Which files can become shorts?

Clips and downloads. Full VODs are usually too long for a vertical post; clip them first.

Do captions change the audio?

No. Profanity masking only edits the burned-in text. The source soundtrack is unchanged.

Can I skip the crop?

Yes. Force original aspect ratio to letterbox, or leave face-aware crop off for a simple center crop.