You paste one YouTube link and a few minutes later you have a Short ready to post. No timeline, no editing software, no dragging clips around.
Turning a long video into a Short is tedious. You scrub the whole thing looking for a good moment, cut it, reframe it vertically, add captions, drop an overlay on top, then export. And you repeat that for every video you want to repurpose. This skill does all of it from the link.
How it works
It's one Claude Code skill. You hand it the URL, it pulls the video down, transcribes it, finds the moment worth clipping, and renders a vertical Short with captions and an overlay using Hyperframes.
flowchart LR URL[YouTube link] --> DL[Download\n+ Whisper transcribe] DL --> PLAN[Score windows\n3 short options] PLAN --> SB[Hyperframes\nstoryboard preview] SB --> MP4[Rendered MP4\n+ title & description]
Running it on a real video
The demo uses a MrBeast video, an 8-minute one so the download and transcription stay quick. Copy the link, open Claude Code in the project that has the skill, and prompt:
youtube to short [URL]
The skill extracts the title and upload date first and asks you to confirm it found the right video. It uses those two fields to name the working folders, so everything stays organized per video.
Then it downloads the video and transcribes it locally with Whisper. Two questions come back before planning: whether to keep the original audio or go SFX only (the original audio looks better in Shorts), and whether to auto-cut noticeable pauses and "ums" from the source. You can opt out of the pause removal, but you usually want it.
Picking the moment
The skill reads the transcript and scores candidate windows, then presents three Short options. Each option gets a score based on the hook, the containment, the energy, and the ending, plus the script text and a loop note. Some Shorts can loop back to the beginning so the viewer thinks it's still the same video, which pushes the views up.
Pick the highest score and it builds the storyboard.
Storyboard preview, then render
Before rendering anything final, it serves a storyboard preview in the browser. You see the captions with their animations, the zoom-ins, and the "full video linked below" card pointing at the original video. Want different captions or another style? Just prompt the change in the same session.
Say you're ready and it renders the MP4. After the render, a final step generates the title and description for the Short, rewritten with a humanizer pass so it doesn't read like AI wrote it.
The result: original video centered on a blurred vertical background, animated captions, pop animations, and the blue card pointing to the full video. All generated from one link.
Where this goes next
Right now it renders one template. The structure is yours to change: split the frame, stack clips, whatever the format needs. The next step is combining it with generated footage, so the Short mixes AI-generated content with the original clip instead of only repurposing it.
Links
If you want this kind of video automation built for your brand or agency, get in touch. We design and build AI UGC ad pipelines for production use.