- In this video, we're going to answer this question
about YouTube shorts.
Does it have to be in vertical video format
or can it be (grunts) landscape?
(chill hip hop music)
- There are certain things that both you and I
can really appreciate when it comes to creating content,
and that is specifics.
When we make something,
we wanna know what baseline we're working to,
minimum requirements, that sort of thing.
And when it comes to YouTube Shorts,
the requirements are a little vague.
The one thing we do know for certain is 60 seconds.
We know that in order for our video
to be considered a YouTube Short
and to possibly appear on that shelf,
it has to be less than a minute.
But what about the format of the video?
This is where YouTube are being positively
loose and fancy-free with their terminology, vertical.
But what does that actually mean?
Is it a aspect ratio of 9 by 16,
a resolution of 1080 by 1920?
Does it mean that the video
can have one more pixel line on the vertical
to be considered a YouTube Short?
We as creators have never had
technical restrictions placed on the content
that we make on the YouTube platform until now.
And so this is my mission in this video.
To help educate you on the exact shape of video
you can use in your YouTube Shorts.
In order to do this, though, there is one important thing
you need to add to your channel.
It's almost impossible to know
when your video will appear as a Shorts video on that shelf
in the mobile app,
so we need to create a controlled environment.
You can do this by adding a Shorts section to your channel.
This is done on the customization screen
in the YouTube Studio.
Once you've added this,
when you visit your channel page
on the YouTube mobile app,
this section will show you all the videos
YouTube considers shorts.
Now remember this doesn't mean that your video
will be guaranteed to appear as a YouTube Short
because it's already competing
against millions of other videos.
It means that the video meets the requirements
to be YouTube Short.
After that, you just have to cross your fingers.
So that's your preamble, let's start testing.
And I'm gonna go straight for the jugular
and not even create a vertical video.
Let's make a square one.
(hands clap) Hey, vidIQ Shorts gang,
welcome to another test,
a test in which both of my hands have just disappeared,
because I needed to crop this video
into a square image.
The reason I'm doing that is to answer a question.
YouTube Shorts, everybody understands the concept
of making a video of less than 60 seconds,
but what does vertical format actually mean?
I've seen several examples of square videos
appearing in YouTube Shorts.
So this is my test.
I'm making a square video to see if it's going to.
So all this looks very encouraging,
and when I checked the analytics for the video,
I can see that some views
are coming from the short's traffic source.
This confirms what I kind of already knew
because I'd seen it in other YouTube Shorts videos.
You can make square videos
(upbeat electronic music) that are classified
as YouTube Shorts.
But what are the pros and cons of doing this?
Well, let's be honest,
YouTube Shorts are not designed with square videos in mind,
so your content is going to suffer
from huge letterboxing black bars
at the top and bottom of the screen.
It does, however, leave the bottom of the screen clean,
so that viewers can easily see the channel name,
video title, and Subscribe button if it appears there.
Also, square videos are what you might call
the compromise format for all social media platforms.
When it comes to TikTok,
they're recorded in vertical format as well,
so it's easy to take your TikTok content
and put it on YouTube.
But let's say you make videos
on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram,
and you know that all of those platforms
accept square as well,
so it means it's much easier to repurpose content.
Ultimately, your job as the creator
is to give the viewer the best possible viewing experience,
and square videos are always going to be a bit of a meh.
You can artificially improve these square videos
and make them taller
by adding graphics at the top or the bottom.
This may be especially useful
for video games which you've recorded in landscape,
and you need to add a bit more to them
than have huge letterboxing at the top and bottom.
What we've established here
are YouTube Shorts safe zones.
You know that if you record something
on your phone in portrait,
it's a vertical format video, absolutely fine.
And if you want to crop it down to square,
that should be fine as well.
So let's start playing around with these formats.
How tall or how wide
can we go?
The most obvious test was to upload a landscape video
of less than 60 seconds
to confirm that these do not count as YouTube Shorts.
And sure enough, the video did not appear
in the Shorts section of the vidIQ Shorts channel.
The next up was to see if I could go
beyond the square format.
So I uploaded a video that was just 10 pixels wider
than it was tall,
and again, the video did not appear in the Shorts section.
So let me just repeat that important test.
The widest YouTube Short you can make is a square video.
If the video is wider than it is tall,
then it won't be considered a YouTube Short.
After that, things got very, very weird.
I wanted to find out the thinnest possible video
I could upload to YouTube,
many of which the studio just gave up on
and wouldn't even process.
But eventually, I did have some success,
if you can call it that.
This video has a resolution of 360 by 1920.
And while it can be viewed on YouTube,
it didn't appear on the Shorts shelf.
But all of this intrigued me enough
to carry on with this experiment.
I continued stripping away pixel after pixel
on the horizontal axis,
whilst adding more vertical pixels
until I ended up with a resolution of 160 by 4096.
In case you're wondering,
that's an aspect ratio of 5 by 128.
I don't even know what that means.
This is a very weird video to watch on YouTube
and changes depending on what device you use,
so do check it out if you want to.
In summary, this is what happened.
After the square video I originally uploaded,
I tested loads of video formats,
both wider than square
and thinner than a standard vertical video
shot on an Android or iPhone device,
and not a single one appeared
on the Short shelf of our channel.
So let's definitively answer this question.
YouTube Shorts have to be less than a minute.
They have to be at a square format, that is fine.
Ideally, vertical formats are shot
on your Android or iPhone device,
and if you go any thinner than that,
then you're running the risk of, again,
the video not being considered a YouTube Short.
Why would you need to go thinner
than the standard mobile phone short anyway?
It's only useful for crazy things like I'm doing
where I'm testing just how thin
a video can go on YouTube.
I had no idea I could make a seven-minute video
on video formats for YouTube Shorts,
but here we are.
Those of you who stuck around,
thank you very much,
and enjoy the rest of your video-making day.