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 in a clean 9:16 frame. No manual editing. No black bars by default. 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 means keyframing the crop by hand, clip after clip, every week. That's a part-time job nobody on staff actually has time for.
Black bars top and bottom leave the sermon in a thin strip of a phone screen. Viewers swipe past it, and it looks amateur next to native vertical content.
Hiring a freelance editor to vertical-reformat your weekly sermon is a per-video cost that comes back every Sunday. Sermon Clips does the reframe, the captions and the clean-up for $9.99 a week or $23.99 a month, and your first two sermons are free.
Five steps from your horizontal source file to a vertical, social-ready clip. No editor, no manual cropping, no decisions to make.
Upload your horizontal sermon
Drop in a 16:9 file or a YouTube link. Most churches record 16:9, and that is what the reframe is built around.
AI finds the speaker
Computer vision samples faces through the clip and picks out the preacher. A face that never moves, like a photo on a projection screen, never holds the crop.
Face-tracked crop window follows them
A full-height 9:16 crop window glides across the source frame to keep the speaker in view as they move. Smoothed, so no jitter, no jump-cuts, no awkward snapping.
Vertical 9:16 clip rendered
The clip renders as a 1080 by 1920 vertical with word-timed captions burned in. No black bars unless you choose Whole frame.
Ready for Reels, Shorts, and TikTok
Download the vertical file and upload it natively to Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, TikTok or Facebook Reels. It is 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 choices built into the Sermon Clips reframe.
Full height, no extra zoom
The crop is always the full height of your frame, so it never punches in on the speaker's face and the picture is never stretched. It only chooses which vertical slice of the stage to show.
Speaker carries the frame
Wide pulpit shots read as small on mobile. A column cut around the tracked speaker fills the phone screen with the person instead of the stage.
Captions you can place
Word-timed captions are burned into the lower part of the frame. In Adjust you can change their size, position and highlight colour if a platform's buttons would sit on top of them.
Still faces are ignored
A photo on a projection screen or a face on a slide never moves, so the tracker never lets it hold the crop. The crop stays with the person who is actually preaching.
One person followed, your choice if needed
The crop follows one person at a time. On a stage with several people, tap the face you want followed in Adjust and that choice holds for the whole clip.
Whole frame when the picture is the point
For slides, lower thirds or a two-shot where any crop loses what the moment is about, choose Whole frame in Adjust. The full picture sits on a blurred fill and nothing is cropped out.
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.
You choose who is followed
On a stage with more than one person, tap a face on a frame in Adjust and the crop follows that person for the whole clip.
No letterboxing by default
Edge-to-edge 9:16 output. No black bars and no blurred background fill unless you choose Whole frame for a clip.
One format, done well
Every clip is a vertical 9:16 file, the shape Reels, Shorts and TikTok use. We don't make square or landscape versions.
Works on real church recordings
Livestream captures, multi-camera switches and phone recordings all work. The crop is cut from whatever horizontal frame you upload.
Phone-screen resolution
Clips render at 1080 by 1920, the resolution vertical platforms expect.
Upload one horizontal sermon. Get back vertical clips ready for Reels, Shorts, and TikTok. Two sermons free, no card.
Get Free ClipsWhat if there are multiple people on stage?
The crop follows one person: the preacher. Sermon Clips picks the speaker from the picture and the transcript, and a face that never moves, like a photo on a projection screen, never holds the crop. If it is following the wrong person, open Adjust on the clip, tap the face you want followed on a frame from your video, and re-render. There is no split-screen or side-by-side layout; each clip follows one person. For a moment where the whole picture matters, choose Whole frame, which puts the entire picture on a blurred fill and crops nothing out.
What if my recording isn't 16:9?
Most churches record 16:9, and that is what the reframe is built around. The crop is always a full-height 9:16 column cut from your frame, so another horizontal shape still works. The wider the source, the more room the crop has to follow the speaker.
Will the face-track look jittery?
No. The crop moves as a slow pan, not a jump cut. Faces are sampled about twice a second, the path is smoothed over a couple of seconds, and small drifts are ignored, so it reads like a camera operator panning slowly. If the speaker cannot be followed reliably, the clip falls back to a steady crop instead of hunting for a face.
Can I override the crop manually?
Yes, on every plan including the free one. Open Adjust on a clip and choose Follow speaker, Fixed centre (a steady column with no tracking) or Whole frame (the full picture on a blurred fill). You can also tap a face on a frame to say who to follow. There are no keyframes or drag handles; those three choices and the person you tap are the controls.