Why centre cropping ruins a gaming clip
A 16:9 gameplay recording carried over to 9:16 loses about two thirds of its width. That would be survivable if the interesting pixels sat in the middle, but in gaming they never do. Your facecam lives in a corner. Your health, your ammo, your minimap and your killfeed all live along the edges. A centre crop throws away the two things that make the clip yours: your reaction, and the state of the game that explains it.
The usual workaround is to track the speaker and pan around the frame. That works for a podcast, where there is one face and a plain background. On gameplay it produces a clip that drifts about and still only ever shows one of the two things worth seeing.
What the stacked layout actually does
We split the frame into two bands. Your facecam is cropped out of its corner and scaled up to fill the top band, so your reaction is large and centred instead of postage stamp sized. The gameplay is scaled to fit the band underneath in full, with nothing trimmed off the sides, and the space left beside it is filled with a darkened blur of the same frame so the clip reads as one shot rather than a video floating in a black box.
The captions sit directly under your face, in the gap between the two bands, which is where a viewer's eye already is. The hook line sits at the very bottom, out of the way of both.
It reads what you said, not what was loud
A lot of gaming clippers key on audio peaks, because a spike in volume is cheap to detect and screaming usually means something happened. The trouble is that it finds the scream and not the setup, so you get a clip that opens on the payoff with no idea what you are looking at.
We transcribe the whole video first, then read that transcript from start to finish and choose moments that have a beginning. That is why a clip out of a batch here tends to open on you saying what is about to go wrong, rather than three seconds into the shouting.
Built for long recordings
Gaming sources are long, and the whole point is that you should not have to scrub through two hours to find the four minutes worth posting. A pasted link can be up to four hours. On the free tier your first two videos can each be up to two hours, which covers most single session recordings and most edited uploads outright.
Post straight to your channel
Give a finished clip a title and it uploads to your own YouTube channel as a Short. You choose private, unlisted or public. Nothing is ever posted unless you press the button.
Your last recording has Shorts in it
Point us at it and they are cut, captioned and waiting, with your facecam still in frame. The first two videos are free.
Frequently asked questions
›Does it work if my video has no facecam?
Yes. When there is no second camera in the frame there is nothing to stack, so the clip is reframed to 9:16 the ordinary way, keeping the action centred. The stacked layout only comes into play when there is a facecam to keep.
›Does it detect kills, clutches or deaths?
No, and we would rather say so. Moments are chosen from what you said, not from what happened on screen, so the tool is strongest on gameplay you talk over: commentary, reactions, rage, teaching, coop banter. Silent gameplay with no voice track has nothing for it to read.
›Which games does it support?
All of them, because nothing in the pipeline is game specific. It reads your voice and finds your facecam, so a game it has never seen behaves exactly like one it has.
›How long does a batch take?
Usually a couple of minutes for a short video. A long recording takes longer because the whole thing has to be transcribed first. We email you the moment the clips are ready, so you do not have to sit on the page.
›Do I have to upload the file?
Only if you want to. If the video is already on your channel, signing in with YouTube or pasting the link is enough and we fetch it ourselves. Uploading a file from disk also works.