Full-length videos can still pack in-depth stories and analyses, but the platform is clearly shifting. As of October 2025, YouTube hosts over 900 million Shorts, and while traditional videos still exist in the tens of billions, it’s the Shorts that dominate daily uploads and views.

Short-form videos now make up roughly 10% of all watch time on YouTube, which shows how quickly they’ve become a cornerstone of the platform, not a side experiment. It means that viewers want fast, engaging clips, and creators are adapting fast.

If you’ve ever tried turning a long YouTube video into Shorts, you already know how tedious it can be. Scrubbing through hours of footage just to find a few perfect seconds feels endless. That’s why doing it manually doesn’t make sense anymore: AI tools can handle this job in minutes, whether you’re slicing existing content or generating new Shorts entirely.

Can You Clip YouTube Videos?

Yes, YouTube lets you create short clips from public videos, as long as the creator has allowed clipping. You can do it on both desktop and mobile, and each clip can be anywhere from 5 to 60 seconds long.

However, there’s a catch. Those clips stay inside YouTube’s ecosystem, you can’t download or edit them further. To break out of that limitation, you’ll need an external tool. AI-powered platforms like AI Video Cut let you grab, trim, and repurpose content freely, giving you full creative control over your clips.

Can I Stop Others from Clipping My YouTube Videos?

You can. If you prefer to keep full control of your content and prevent other users from making clips with it, you can disable the clipping feature on your entire channel and specific videos alike.

Open YouTube Studio.
Head over to Content and choose the video you want to edit.
Tap Show More, scroll down to Allow viewers to clip my content, and toggle it off.
Save the changes.

How to Clip a YouTube Video with AI

Clipping a YouTube video takes a few minutes with AI Video Cut, an AI-powered online video repurposing tool. Instead of manually scrubbing through a video timeline, AI Video Cut watches the video for you and automatically detects key moments based on dialogue, emotions, and conversations in the original video.

Let’s see how it all works:

Step 1: Find the video you want to clip and upload it to AI Video Cut.

You can either paste a YouTube link or upload a local file if you have the video on your computer or smartphone which you can download with 4K Video Downloader Plus.

Step 2: Choose the desired setting in AI Video Cut.

The next adjustments are optional:

Choose the output type. It depends on the format of the video you want to get as a result: would it be a how-to clip? An ad? A teaser? There are plenty of types you can choose from, or even come up with your own prompt to create entirely unique and tailored to your goals.

Set the aspect ratio: 9:16, 1:1, 16:9, or keep the original one. It largely depends on which platform you’re going to upload your clip.

Set the output video length from 30 seconds to 120 seconds.

Select the style of the captions or turn them off entirely. We recommend using captions in your short clips, as, according to the stats, about 21% of users watch Shorts with the sound off.

Once you click Submit in AI Video Cut, the tool will start processing your original long-form video and turn it into clips based on the settings you’ve chosen above.

All you have to do next is just review the clip and either download it, or, if you’d like to make adjustments, regenerate the clip or edit the existing one in the text-based AI Video Cut editor.

How to Clip a YouTube Video on Desktop

If you’d rather clip a video right on YouTube, here are the steps you should take to do it right in your browser:

Open a YouTube video.
Tap the Clip button below the video (look for a scissors icon).

Adjust the sliders to choose a section between 5 and 60 seconds.
Add a title for your clip.
Click on Share Clip, and YouTube will create a short link that plays just that part of the video.

You can use this method as an alternative to the third-party AI tools for sharing moments, but remember that you wouldn’t be able to download, save, edit it or add captions to your video.

How to Clip a YouTube Video on Mobile

You can do the job on YouTube’s mobile app as well; here’s how:

Open the video you want to clip in the YouTube app on your smartphone.
Take a look at the option under the video. You’ll see the Clip icon with scissors among the Share, Remix, Download, and other options.
Move the trim handles to select the exact video segment you want.
Give your clip a title and tap Share Clip.

AI has made video editing faster and easier than ever. With AI Video Cut’s YouTube clipping tool, turning a long YouTube video into a bite-sized highlight is no longer a technical chore but a simple two-step process. No matter what you need clips for: growing your YouTube channel, boosting the brand awareness of your company, or simply having fun, just remember that there’s AI for that that can do the job faster and less daunting.

Troubleshooting: Why Can't I Clip a YouTube Video?

The reason might be that a YouTube creator has restricted their channel or this particular video from being clipped, so you're not able to clip right in YouTube with the platform's built-in tools. However, you can still do it with AI Video Cut, either by pasting the video URL or saving it on your device first with 4K Video Downloader Plus.