YouTube Shorts Trend Finder with OpenAI, Airtable & Creatomate (n8n)

Find YouTube Shorts trends fast—and turn approvals into rendered videos automatically

This n8n automation workflow discovers trending topics from YouTube Most Popular and Google Trends, uses OpenAI to generate Shorts-ready angles, saves them for human review in Airtable, and sends approved items to Creatomate to render videos—then writes the render status and URL back to Airtable.

What this workflow does

• Runs on schedule or on demand: discovery runs three times daily, while approvals are checked every minute (or you can use manual triggers for testing).
• Collects trend signals: pulls YouTube Most Popular videos via the YouTube Data API and reads the Google Trends RSS feed for your configured region.
• Combines and ranks opportunities: normalizes, deduplicates, and packages the signals, then asks OpenAI to select up to five high-scoring commentary opportunities with a hook and short script.
• Creates Airtable review records: writes each opportunity to Airtable, including rights status and metadata for human approval.
• Queues only approved work: polls Airtable for records marked Status = Approved, validates required fields and an approved rights status, then marks valid items as Queued (or Failed with an error).
• Renders with Creatomate: sends the approved payload to an n8n webhook that triggers a Creatomate render using a template with dynamic Hook and Supporting_Text.
• Tracks render results: polls Creatomate until success or retry limit, then updates Airtable with Rendered/Failed, the job ID, and the final render URL.

Use cases

• Automation engineers validating a complete YouTube Shorts content pipeline in n8n.
• SaaS operators needing a repeatable workflow for trend discovery → AI scripting → approval → video rendering.
• Teams that want human-in-the-loop rights checks before generating Shorts at scale.

Technical details

• Integrations: OpenAI (ranking + hook/script drafting), Airtable (review + status tracking), Creatomate (rendering), YouTube Data API, and Google Trends RSS.
• n8n node concepts used: if, set, code, no op, wait, merge.
• Required credentials: OpenAI API, Airtable HTTP Header Auth (Bearer token), and Creatomate HTTP Header Auth.