How to Turn Long-Form Video Into Short-Form Content

1. Selecting moments that stand alone

A short clip has no room to establish context, so the only moments that work are the ones a stranger can understand cold. That usually means a complete thought with its own setup and payoff inside forty to sixty seconds. The test is simple: play it to someone who has not seen the source and see whether they need you to explain anything. If they do, either the clip starts too late or the moment is not self-contained.

• A claim plus its reasoning, contained in one stretch of speech.
• A story with a beginning and a punchline.
• A specific, surprising number or result.
• A disagreement or a correction of something the audience believes.

2. Generate the candidate clips

Rather than scrubbing a long recording by hand, ask for the clips as a set. Cubix reads the whole recording and returns individual clip candidates you can browse, preview and take into editing one at a time, which is a much better workflow than assembling everything onto one timeline. If you need a specific number, say the number — that is what makes it binding.

3. Reframe to vertical

Short-form is a 9:16 frame on every major platform, and a widescreen recording has to be converted rather than letterboxed. Reframing crops around the subject so the speaker stays in shot as they move, which is what stops the classic failure where a head drifts off the edge halfway through the clip. For two-person footage, the frame should follow whoever is speaking.

• Fill crops to cover the vertical frame — the standard choice for full-bleed short-form.
• Reframe follows the subject, which matters most on handheld or wide interview footage.
• Frame keeps the whole shot in an inset card, useful when nothing can be cropped away.

4. Fix the first two seconds

The opening of a repurposed clip is almost always wrong, because it starts wherever the source happened to start. Trim until the first words out of the clip are the interesting ones — not the setup, not the throat-clearing, not the interviewer's question unless the question is the hook. On short-form the viewer decides in about two seconds, so anything before the promise is dead weight.

5. Caption and finish

Captions are not optional on short-form; most of the feed is watched muted. Generate word-timed captions, then choose the style to match the content rather than defaulting to the loudest available. Keep the finish light: hard cuts, one look, and zooms only where a line genuinely needs emphasis. Music helps on montage-style clips and often hurts on a strong talking-head moment.

• One to three words on screen at a time reads fastest in a vertical frame.
• Keep captions inside the middle of the frame so platform UI does not sit on top of them.
• Loud boxed caption styles suit entertainment hooks; keyword accents and clean styles suit business and education.

6. Variants per platform

A single clip can serve several platforms, but the details differ enough to be worth adjusting. The frame is the same on TikTok, Reels and Shorts; the pacing expectations, the caption style and the ideal length are not. LinkedIn wants a squarer frame and a calmer treatment, and widescreen still wins for anything embedded on your own site.

• TikTok and Reels: 9:16, roughly 15 to 60 seconds, captions and music expected, fast pacing.
• YouTube Shorts: 9:16, up to a minute, captions expected, slightly more restrained than TikTok.
• LinkedIn: 1:1 works well in feed, 30 to 90 seconds, captions on, restrained look.
• X and embedded video: 16:9 still reads best, and a slower opening is tolerated.