How To Make YouTube Shorts On PC or Laptop (Film, Edit, Upload)

YouTube has been rolling out the Shorts Camera App to everybody in the US, but what about those people don’t have it yet, or want to upload a shorts video from their PC or laptop?

In this video, I’m going to show you how to make a YouTube shorts video on your PC, on your laptop, starting from scratch or resizing a regular YouTube video.

Click here to get The One Blueprint That Gives You Step-By-Step Instructions
On How To Grow A Profitable YouTube Channel

Film Your Video

If you’re filming with a mirrorless camera like I have here on the Canon M50, you want to change it to the vertical position. Like so. If you don’t have a professional camera, you can just use a cheap webcam like this one attached to my iMac computer. If your laptop or PC has a built-in webcam, just use that. After you’ve filmed a shorts video, take the SD card out of your camera and insert it into your computer. If you’ve filmed your shorts video using a built-in webcam or the external webcam, it’ll already be on your computer.

Edit Your Shorts Video

To edit your shorts video, I highly recommend using Kapwing, a free online video editor. I’ll place a link to Kapwing in the description below this video. I recommend signing up for a free account so you have the watermark removed from your shortS video. I already have an account, so I’m just going to sign it. Click sign-in, click continue with Google, click new content. You can start with a blank canvas. You can upload a file or drag and drop a file onto the canvas. If you already have a YouTube video that you want to rescale for a shorts video, you can enter the URL in here and rescale it.

Later on, I will show you how to rescale or resize a regular YouTube video into a vertical shorts video. Click start with a blank canvas, for a shorts video, it has to be 9 by 16 to be a vertical video. I’m going to click 9 by 16, I’m going to click upload so I can drag and drop a file here or I can choose a video URL from YouTube. This my shorts video file, so I’m going to drag and drop that onto the canvas. Now, it’s converting the video file 87%. Now it’s uploading. Here’s my shorts video that’s been added. Now, that the shorts video has been uploaded, we can edit the shorts video.

Let me explain the interface of Kapwing. You can add text, images. You got the timeline below here. You can add more scenes by just clicking add scene, you can add audio. You can even add your own voiceover, you can add subtitles, you can add elements so you can add all these different shapes to your video. You can also record. Record the screen, record camera only, record audio only. Over here on the right under edit, you can adjust the speed, the volume. We can do zoom to adjust the canvas and also adjust the corners on it. You can also rotate, you can flip upside down and also make an outline and add some layers.

You also have the ability to animate, add affects and adjust the timing. You’ll stick with edit. Want to add some text, just click texts. I’m going to add increase audience retention, expanded it by just moving the handles here, and I can also change the color. If I go over here, I can change it to red, yellow, blue if I want. I’m going to stick for black for now. I can also add a text outline so I can do light, dark. I’ll stick with light so that you see it better. You can also add a text background color. Currently, we have no color, so we could add a yellow background if we wanted as well.

I just use the eyedropper tool here, but for now, I’m just going to choose transparent. If you want to undo a command on the Mac, use command plus Z. If you want to redo a command use command plus shift plus Z or command plus Y. On a PC, for undo, use control plus C or redo, control plus Y. If you want to keep that text on the screen all the way through the video, just go to the timeline here and just drag it all the way to the end. If you want to preview the video, you just click play.

You can also split the video on the timeline. After you’re happy with making the short video, just click export video. “It says your watermark-free content is being exported.” We’re going to wait a bit and then we’re going to check the video. It says, “if you have any issues, report a problem to let us know, we’re constantly developing new features and fixing bugs.” it looks like our shorts video has finished processing, now we just click play to preview the shorts video. Here’s a tip to improve your audience retention on YouTube.

I can download it. I can edit it again, make a copy. I can also share it on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or copy the link, and I can also embed it. I want to upload it to YouTube, so I’m just going to click download. Here’s the file for my YouTube shorts video, ready to upload to YouTube.

How To Resize A Regular YouTube Video To A Shorts Video

The beauty of resizing or rescaling a video you’ve already uploaded to YouTube is that you don’t have to start from scratch. Here’s how to do it. Go to your content tab in YouTube Studio to download a video. I’m going to select this one, click on the video and click on the three dots, it says options.

Click download. This will download the video to your computer so you can import or upload it to Kapwing the free online video editor. Log into Kapwing and click on new content. You can start with a blank canvas, upload your video file from your computer, or drag and drop the file onto the canvas. You can also paste a YouTube video URL into this box to fetch the video. Here’s my video file. I’m just going to drag and drop it onto the canvas. Now, you can see that video has been imported into Kapwing. It’s currently in a landscape format, which is great for regular YouTube videos, but I want to make it into a vertical format of 9 by 16.

Click crop, click 9 by 16. Now, I can just move this vertical box anywhere on the landscape video to capture a vertical video to use for shorts. When you’ve done that, just click done cropping. Now you can preview the video by just playing it. As you go through your video, you can select different clips that you can add to your vertical shorts video. For example on timeline, you can select the clip and then just click split to add that clip. If you want to undo the command, just press command plus Z on the keyboard for the Mac. If you want to redo the command, just press command plus Y for the Mac.

Now, you can add elements to your shorts video just like I showed you before, such as text, images, audio, subtitles, et cetera. After you’re finished editing your shorts video, just click export video. It says, “You watermark-free content is being exported.” You just got to wait a few minutes for the video to finish processing. Here’s my edited shorts video that is ready to be downloaded. I just click download, edit it, make a copy, share on my social media sites. Copy the link, embed it or start another project. When you upload a shorts video to YouTube, it will appear with your regular YouTube videos.

Just make sure that you add the hashtag shorts in the title or description. Log into your YouTube channel, click the camera icon at the top of the page. Click upload video, select your file or drag and drop the file. I’m just going to drag and drop a file. Now, it’s uploading. Add a title, call this test. Add the hashtag shorts in the description. I recommend adding a custom thumbnail because your shorts video will also be found in browse, search, and suggested videos, which brings you more traffic. Click upload scroll down, under audience check, “No, it’s not made for kids”, it’s not paid promotion.

You can also add some tags here if you wish. Check your language, recording date and location, license, it’s going to be standard YouTube license, allow embedding, publish to subscriptions feed and notify subscribers. Select a category, comments, and ratings. Click next. Select monetization off. Done. Next. Add video elements. Let’s skip that. Click next, checks, copyright. No issues found. Add suitability. That’s all fine. Click next and now you can save or publish it as a private video unlisted. For the purposes of this demonstration, I’m just going to select unlisted.

If you want to make your video go public, then just select public and click save. Here’s my shorts video. If I click on details, click play, here’s my shorts video with black bars on either side of it. If you view it from your phone, then it wouldn’t have the black bars, it’ll occupy the whole screen.

What if you already have the YouTube Shorts Camera App, and you want to make a YouTube shorts video on your phone?
Just watch this video on how to make a YouTube shorts video on your phone using the YouTube Shorts Camera App.

Click here to get The One Blueprint That Gives You Step-By-Step Instructions
On How To Grow A Profitable YouTube Channel

Speak Your Mind

*