Why long recordings rarely become shorts
Most creators have a folder of long recordings and a feed that goes quiet between uploads. The reason is not laziness. Scrubbing through forty minutes of footage looking for the two minutes that would work on their own is slow, boring, and happens at the end of the day when the energy for it has gone. Then there is the reframing: a widescreen recording has to become a tall one, and every clip needs captions because most people watch shorts with the sound off.
AI Shorts Creator does exactly that chore and nothing else. It is not a general editor and it does not generate footage. You upload a recording, it reads it, and it hands back a handful of finished vertical clips. The whole run usually takes a few minutes for a fifteen-minute source.
What happens to your upload, step by step
First the audio is pulled out of the file and transcribed with timestamps on every single word. That transcript is what everything else is built on: the picker reads it to choose moments, and the caption renderer uses the word timings so each caption lands exactly when the word is spoken.
Next, a language model reads the transcript the way a producer would. It looks for a hook in the first sentence, a complete thought in the middle, and a natural stopping point, and it avoids starting in the middle of a sentence. It proposes three to five windows between 20 and 60 seconds and writes a short title for each one so you know what the clip is about before you watch it.
Finally each window is cut from the original, reframed to 1080×1920, captioned, and given a thin progress bar along the bottom edge. The output is an ordinary MP4 with everything burned in, so it plays the same on every platform and in every app.
Framing choices for different kinds of footage
A single talking head is the easy case: centre crop keeps the speaker large and throws away the empty sides of the widescreen frame. For footage where the sides matter — a slide deck, a two-person interview, gameplay — switch to blur-pad. The full picture is kept and letterboxed in the middle of the vertical frame, and a blurred, slightly darkened copy of the same frame fills the space above and below so nothing looks empty.
Both modes are set once per job. If you are not sure, run centre crop first; the job is cheap enough to run again with the other setting while the upload is still on file.
Captions and the progress bar
Captions are rendered as short cards of three or four words in the lower third of the frame, large enough to read on a phone held at arm’s length. The default style sets the words in bold uppercase and lights up the word being spoken in a warm yellow. A quieter sentence-case style is available for content where shouting would feel wrong, and you can turn captions off entirely if your platform adds its own.
The progress bar is a small thing with a measurable effect: viewers can see that a clip is nearly over, which keeps them to the end instead of swiping at the first lull. It is drawn in the site’s cobalt blue, sits on the bottom edge, and never covers the picture.
What it costs and what you keep
A job is 40 credits regardless of how many shorts come out of it or how long the source is, as long as it is under fifteen minutes and five hundred megabytes. Every new account begins with two credits so you can see the interface, and the plans start at nine dollars a month for six jobs. Your upload is stored privately under a random name and deleted a day later; the finished shorts stay in your library and are yours to download, share, or delete.