Two triumphs in one – my very first home-made greenscreen stop motion video featuring that banana, and an editing discovery that subverts YouTube’s recent no-choice Shorts conversion for videos that might a) be less than a minute long or b) portrait aspect ratio. These links don’t embed in WordPress or are recognised for the making of QR codes so, in case you’re reading this and it’s happening to you, the trick is to edit the link thus:

Your YouTube generated link might look something like this: https://youtube.com/shorts/_thV9qFt_u0?feature=share [Note; this link is for illustration only, I removed the video it originally led to.]

1. Separate youtu and be with a .  to arrive at //youtu.be/

2. Remove everything after be/ referring to shorts. Also remove the www after the // at the beginning if there is one.

3. Remove everything after the identifying code /_thV9qFt_0?feature=share

3. Leave the ? because it’s part of the code. Made that mistake!

There’s probably an easier way which might include somehow intercepting the transformation during upload, and if I find it, I’ll report back. Otherwise we need YouTube to offer the choice, and/or other platforms to enable use of this code format. As YouTube seems to be aiming at the TikTok market, the onus may ultimately be on the user platforms.

But: don’t underestimate the power of Shorts; one of mine got nearly 1500 views (compared with double figures if I’m lucky) in a matter of hours and they always out-hit regular format videos. Might be worth having both if anyone can figure out the criteria. Short and portrait seems most likely.

Footnote. This animation in MotionLeap (post prod + audio in Filmora Pro) is short but not portrait format and wasn’t processed as a Short.

Then somebody requested a space monkey rescue team …

Over and out 🙂