Most churches record horizontal — for the livestream, for the projection screens, for the multi-camera switch. But TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts demand vertical. Sermon Clips uses face-tracking AI to auto-pan the crop window so the speaker stays centered in a clean 9:16 frame. No manual editing. No black-bar letterboxing. No awkward zoom-and-pray.
Your sermon recording exists. Vertical-ready clips do not. The gap between them is where most church social strategies die.
Manual reframing in CapCut takes 10 minutes per clip. 70 minutes for 7 clips. Every week. That's a part-time job nobody on staff actually has time for.
Black bars top-and-bottom signal "repurposed horizontal" to the algorithm. TikTok and Reels demote it, viewers swipe past it, and your videos look amateur next to native vertical content.
Hiring a freelance editor to vertical-reformat your weekly sermon runs $200–$500 a month — more than the entire Sermon Clips subscription, just for one task we automate.
Five steps from your horizontal source file to a vertical, social-ready export. No editor, no manual cropping, no decisions to make.
Upload your horizontal sermon
Drop in a 16:9 file, a YouTube link, or a Vimeo URL. Any horizontal aspect ratio works — 16:9, 4:3, 1.85:1, or ultra-wide 2.39:1 cinematic.
AI detects the speaker
Computer vision scans every frame to locate the speaker's face. When there are multiple people on stage, lip-tracking plus audio source detection identifies who's actively talking.
Face-tracked crop window follows them
A 9:16 crop window glides across the source frame to keep the active speaker centered as they move. Smoothed easing — no jitter, no jump-cuts, no awkward snapping.
Vertical 9:16 output rendered
The final clip exports at full source resolution within the new aspect ratio. No letterboxing, no upscaling artifacts, no quality loss from the reframe pass.
Ready for Reels, Shorts, and TikTok
Download the vertical file and upload it natively to Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, or TikTok. Algorithms read it as native vertical content because that's what it is.
A 9:16 crop is more than just chopping the sides off. These are the framing principles built into the Sermon Clips reframe engine.
Face in the upper third
Eyes are where viewers focus first. The AI positions the speaker's face in the upper third of the vertical frame — not dead-center — which matches where the human gaze naturally lands when scrolling.
Subject fills 70%+ of frame
Wide pulpit shots read as boring on mobile. The reframe zooms in enough that the speaker fills at least 70% of the vertical frame, giving the clip presence and emotion you can feel through a 6-inch screen.
Captions in the safe zone
Instagram's UI (caption text, like button, share sheet) overlays the bottom 15% of the screen. Burned-in captions land above that line so they're never clipped or obscured by the platform chrome.
No extreme zoom
Cropping in too tight makes faces look distorted and pixelated, especially on lower-resolution source files. The engine caps the zoom level to preserve natural proportions even when the source has the speaker far from the camera.
Secondary speakers stay in frame
On panel discussions or multi-person stages, the crop expands intelligently to keep secondary speakers visible when they're part of the moment — instead of cutting them out the second the primary speaker is talking.
Side-by-side for two-person dialogue
When two people are trading lines back-and-forth, a stacked side-by-side layout keeps both faces visible at once. Better than rapid camera-cuts that disorient mobile viewers.
Face-tracking pan (not static crop)
The crop window moves with the speaker across the stage. Static center-crops lose the preacher the moment they walk three feet to the left.
Multi-speaker awareness
Lip-tracking plus audio source detection identifies the active speaker on panels, dialogues, and Q&A moments — the frame follows whoever's talking.
No letterboxing
Real edge-to-edge 9:16 output. No black bars, no blurred background fill, no "wide video inside vertical frame" shortcuts that the algorithms can detect.
Also exports 1:1 and 4:5
Same reframe engine generates square (1:1) for Facebook and Twitter, plus portrait (4:5) for Instagram feed — from one upload, in one pass.
Works on any input aspect ratio
16:9, 4:3, 1.85:1, 2.39:1 — the reframe engine handles any horizontal source. Older multi-cam recordings and modern cinematic captures both work.
Preserves source resolution
Reframe happens at native resolution, so a 1080p source produces a sharp 1080x1920 vertical export. No upscaling, no muddy compression artifacts from the resize.
Upload one horizontal sermon. Get back vertical clips ready for Reels, Shorts, and TikTok. Free to try.
Get Free ClipsWhat if there are multiple people on stage?
The AI prioritizes the active speaker using a combination of lip-tracking and audio source detection. When the primary preacher is talking, the crop window stays on them. When a guest speaker, worship leader, or panel member takes over, the frame transitions to follow them. For dialogue moments (two people on stage trading lines), you can opt into a stacked side-by-side vertical layout that keeps both faces in frame at once.
Does it work on cinematic 2.39:1 sermons?
Yes — the reframe engine works on any horizontal aspect ratio. Whether your source is 16:9 (standard livestream), 4:3 (older recordings), 1.85:1 (cinematic), or 2.39:1 (ultra-wide), the AI detects the speaker within the source frame and generates a clean 9:16 vertical crop. The wider the source, the more headroom the AI has to track movement, which actually improves results on ultra-wide footage.
Will the face-track look jittery?
No. The crop window uses smoothed easing rather than jump-cuts, so the camera glides as the speaker moves across the stage. We tuned the motion model specifically for pulpit and stage movement — slow lateral pacing, occasional larger steps, gestures within a fixed footprint. The result reads like an intentional camera operator panning slowly, not a phone trying to keep up with a moving target.
Can I override the crop manually?
Yes on paid tiers. The editor lets you drag the crop window per-clip, lock it to a fixed position, or set custom keyframes if the AI picked the wrong subject (e.g. you want to focus on the worship leader instead of the preacher). The free tier is auto-only — the AI's choice ships as-is — which is the right starting place for most one-person sermons but limits you on multi-speaker stages.