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Getting started

Choosing what to clip

Most services are mostly not the sermon. Telling ReelUse where the talk actually starts makes the clips better and the run cheaper at the same time.

Trim to the sermon

Open the Trim to sermon chip under the link box and drag the two handles to where the talk starts and ends. Everything outside that window is ignored: it is not transcribed, it is not analysed, and no clip can come from it.

The handles sit on a bar as long as your recording, and the line beneath them states the window you have chosen and how many talks it will use. Nothing to type, and nothing to keep in step: one control, one answer.

This is available on every plan, including Free.

A window shorter than a minute is ignored, and the whole recording is used instead. If you meant to clip a 40 second moment, that is not what the trim is for: it is for cutting a two hour service down to the talk inside it.

Why it improves the clips, not just the cost

Worship, notices, offering and the welcome are not bad content, but they are not the talk, and asking a selection process to weigh a song against a sermon point is asking it to compare unlike things. Give it just the message and every clip it picks is competing against other moments from the message.

When we find it for you

If the video has chapters and one of them looks like the sermon, we fill the trim in for you as soon as you paste the link, and tell you which chapter we used so you can correct it. Chapters with names like Sermon, Message, The Word, Teaching or Preaching are the ones that get picked up.

If we cannot read the chapters, the app says so rather than sitting there looking like it worked. If the video simply has none, we stay quiet, because there is nothing to report: the window is yours to set.

You are never stuck with what we guessed. Edit either field and your numbers win.

What a trim saves

One talk covers up to 60 minutes of recording. What counts is the part you asked us to analyse, not the length of the original video, so trimming is the difference between a Sunday costing one talk and costing three.

A 45 minute sermon 60 min 1 talk A 90 minute service 60 min 60 min 2 talks A 3 hour conference 60 min 60 min 60 min 3 talks One talk covers up to 60 minutes. Anything longer uses another, up to a 6 hour ceiling. Trimming to the sermon is the cheapest way to run a long service.
How your monthly talks are spent. The length that counts is the part you ask ReelUse to analyse, so a tight trim on a three hour service can cost a single talk.

The app tells you what a stretch will cost before you commit to it. The absolute ceiling is six hours in one go, and the floor at the other end is five minutes: below that there is nothing in the recording for us to find, so it is turned away before it can use a talk.

One thing worth doing before you submit: check that the recording is clean. We process what you give us, so a dropped frame, a lower third or a countdown in the file stays in your clips.

The full breakdown of how talks are counted, and how many each plan gets, is in Plans, talks and billing.

Naming the moments you want Growth and up

Open the Moments chip and describe, in plain words, a moment you know is in the talk:

  • the story about his grandmother
  • the part on generational blessings
  • the altar call

Clips that match what you described are pushed up the ranking, and they arrive labelled Matches your request so you can see which ones answered you.

It is a nudge, not a filter. Naming a moment does not stop other strong clips being found, and it does not guarantee your moment becomes a clip. If the passage you asked for does not hold together on its own, it will not be forced into a clip that disappoints.

Write it the way you would say it to a person. You do not need keywords and you do not need to quote the talk exactly. A sentence is plenty; there is room for a short paragraph if the talk covered several things you care about.

Using both together

They do different jobs and they work well together. The trim decides where we look. The moments note nudges what we favour inside that stretch.

On a long conference session, the honest advice is: trim first, and only bother with a moments note if there is a specific moment you already know you want. On a normal Sunday sermon, a trim alone is usually enough.