YouTube is expanding with its latest feature, YouTube Shorts, which allows any public video to be used as content for its TikTok competitor. Green Screen is a feature that allows users to use up to a 60-second video clip from any qualified YouTube video or YouTube Shorts as the background for their new original Shorts video.
Although YouTube Short has only been available for a short time, it has quickly become one of the most popular features on the platform. Content creators will utilize it to enhance engagement and create unique content.
The appearance-smoothing Retouch feature, a Lighting feature to boost dark environments, an Align feature that aligns the subject from the last frame of a video with a new video, a text and timeline editor to add messages over top videos, various video filters, and, most recently, Cut — the tool that effectively made all of YouTube’s public content possible Shorts material — are all now available to YouTube Shorts creators.
Unless the creator has opted out, the platform claims the new Green Screen remix function can be utilized with any public YouTube video. The lone exemption is music videos that feature copyrighted content from YouTube’s partners or others with visual claims. Green Screen videos, like Cut videos, contain a link back to the original content source for attribution purposes.
According to Google, the new Green Screen feature is now available on iOS and will soon be available on Android. When asked why YouTube chose iOS over Google’s own mobile platform, the company merely said that it was motivated by the need to deploy new features swiftly.
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“Our objective is to provide the best experience to our creators as rapidly as possible,” a spokeswoman said. “This occasionally involves releasing particular functionality to one platform before another.”
As the competition with TikTok heats up, YouTube’s decision to make its platform’s videos open for remixing is designed to be a competitive edge. It’s worth noting that the option is turned off by default, implying that videos are up for grabs until a creator indicates otherwise. So far, there hasn’t been much of a reaction to this decision. Some creators believe Shorts is just another way to get their channel discovered or that Shorts won’t cut into their viewership because it’s a different viewing experience.