Your first run
The first time you sign in you will confirm your email address and answer a short form about who you are. That form is what puts your name and organisation on things later, and you can change all of it in Settings.
- Open your Library. It is the home screen after you sign in, and the submit bar sits at the top.
- Paste a public or unlisted YouTube link. A preview card appears with the video's title and thumbnail so you can check you pasted the right one.
- Optionally use the chips under the link box: Trim to sermon for the part you want, Moments for something you have in mind, Audio to reduce background noise, and Look to dress this one talk differently. All four are optional, and none of them changes your saved settings.
- Tick I own this content or have the rights to process it.
- Press Make clips.
Which links work
Standard YouTube addresses: watch, youtu.be, Shorts, live and embed links all work. The video has to be public or unlisted, and it has to play in a normal browser tab.
- Private, members-only and region-locked videos cannot be processed. There is no way around this: if we cannot open it, we cannot clip it.
- If your link carries a playlist on the end of it (
&list=…), only the one video you linked is used. The playlist is ignored. - A live stream has to have finished, and the platform has to have finished preparing the replay. See Troubleshooting if one is turned away.
- The recording has to be at least five minutes long. Anything shorter is already about the length of one clip.
The rights checkbox
Before a run starts you confirm you own the content or have permission to process it. It is not decoration. Uploading someone else's sermon or lecture to be clipped is exactly the thing that gets accounts and videos taken down, and we have a takedown process that anyone can use against material they own.
If you record it, or your organisation does, you are fine. If you are clipping a guest speaker, the polite and safe thing is to ask them first.
While it runs
The run appears under In progress and moves through four stages: transcribing the talk, finding the best moments, cutting the clips, then rendering the vertical video. The card updates itself every few seconds.
You can close the tab. The work is happening on our machines, not in your browser, and we email you when it is done. The first clip is usually ready in 10 to 15 minutes and the rest follow as they finish, so you can start posting before the run is over. A long recording or a busy Sunday afternoon can take longer.
Part-way through, a button appears offering to show you the clips that are already finished. The rest keep rendering while you watch.
What comes back
A handful of clips, ordered strongest first, each one already cut, reframed to vertical, captioned and branded. Most land between forty and ninety seconds, because that is the length that tends to hold attention all the way to the end.
The number varies with the talk, and it is not a target we pad out. A rich forty-minute sermon gives more than a thirty-minute announcement-heavy service. Occasionally a talk yields nothing that stands on its own, and the run will say so rather than hand you weak clips.
Each clip also arrives with a written post kit: a title, a caption for the longer platforms, a short one for Instagram and TikTok, and any scripture heard in the clip.
Working from your own file
The web app takes links, which is the convenient path when the recording is not to hand. Working from the original file is better, and it is what ReelUse for Mac and Windows does: it reads the recording where it already sits, so the clips keep full quality and carry none of the graphics a livestream burns into the picture.