Short-form video guide: TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts

Short-form video in one screen

A short is a vertical video made for a phone held upright: nine units wide, sixteen tall, brief, and watched in a feed where the next video is one swipe away. TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels differ in their details, but they ask the same thing of you. Give a stranger a reason to stay in the first moments, keep to one idea, and end before they get bored. None of that depends on expensive equipment. It depends on a clear idea and some discipline in the edit.

Nine by Sixteen is for the people making those videos: solo creators, small businesses, and anyone running a channel without stepping in front of the camera. The guides are sorted by task, from the first line of a script to the cover a viewer taps on, so you can go straight to the stage where you are stuck.

Write the hook before anything else

The opening seconds decide whether the rest gets seen, so that is where the writing effort belongs. How to write a hook for short-form video walks through twelve patterns, from opening on the payoff to asking a question the viewer wants answered. Once the opening works, how to write a video script for Shorts shows how to carry a single idea from first line to last without padding.

If a blank page slows you down, borrow a structure from our video script templates, which cover short, explainer, testimonial and music video formats. To see the method applied to a real topic, the mammoth "cloning" video script is a finished short with its facts checked. And when you come across a video whose pacing you admire, turning a video into a clean script lets you study it on paper, line by line.

Running a channel without showing your face

Many channels never show a presenter. They rely on voiceover, screen recordings, stock or generated footage, text on screen, or a pair of hands at work. The trade-off is that the format has to do what a personality would otherwise do, so it must be chosen with care and repeated consistently. How to start a faceless channel covers picking a niche, settling on a repeatable format and building a workflow you can keep up week after week.

For more specific help, read how to make faceless TikTok videos and our list of faceless YouTube channel ideas. If you have seen "YouTube automation" pitched as easy income, what YouTube automation is explains how the model works, what it costs and whether it still holds up.

Voices, avatars and generated footage

Software can now supply a narrator, a presenter or the pictures themselves. That is useful, and it is also where creators most easily go wrong: a voice that does not suit the subject, visuals that drift away from the script, or a video that falls foul of a platform's rules on synthetic and reused material. We explain how each category of tool works and what to check before relying on it; we do not make or sell one. Begin with how to choose the right type of AI video generator.

For narration, see what an AI voice generator is and how to pick one and the broader guide to text to speech for videos. For visuals, how talking avatar videos work and turning a photo into a short clip cover two common routes. Captions help anyone watching with the sound off, and speech to text software for creators shows how to produce them. Before you publish anything synthetic, read the platform's current rules on disclosure and labels.

Get the frame and the cover right

Technical requirements are dull until one of them crops your caption or blurs your cover. Each platform publishes its own limits for aspect ratio, length, file size and cover images, and those limits change. The Platform Specs section keeps track of them, starting with YouTube thumbnail size and aspect ratio. Whatever the numbers are this year, one habit carries across all three apps: keep text and faces away from the edges of the frame, where buttons and captions sit on top of your video.

Get found, then get watched again

A good video still needs packaging. A clear title, a readable cover and a name people can remember all help a viewer decide to tap. SEO for YouTube videos covers titles, descriptions, chapters and tags. How to make YouTube thumbnails gives a step-by-step workflow, and YouTube channel name ideas is there if you have not settled on a name yet.

After that, growth is mostly patience and attention. Post on a rhythm you can sustain. Look at where viewers drop off. Change one thing at a time, so you know what made the difference. The Growth section is built around that routine, and how to find good video ideas helps when the list runs dry.

Where our facts come from

Lengths, formats and policies are taken from the platforms' own help centers and creator documentation. Every article carries a date and is reviewed, but if a number here ever disagrees with a platform's current help page, trust the platform. The editorial standards page describes the process in full.

Nine by Sixteen is a guide and only a guide. We do not sell a video tool, run an agency, take payment for coverage or use affiliate links. The product that once operated at this web address is not offered here, and we have no connection to it; the about page explains. For a correction or a topic request, use the contact page.