Shooting Your Church Service for Vertical Clips

The middle third

Your livestream is 16:9: wide. Reels, Shorts, and TikTok are 9:16: tall. When you crop a horizontal frame to vertical at full height, you keep roughly the middle third of the picture and lose the rest.

That’s fine when the speaker is in that middle third. It’s a problem when:

• The shot is wide, so the speaker is a small figure in a slice of stage.
• The speaker walks from one side to the other.
• The shot is framed with the speaker off to one side for a nice livestream composition.

A few small habits on Sunday make clips much better on Monday.

Shot choices that survive the crop

• Make the medium shot your sermon shot. Chest- or waist-up framing reads as personal on a phone and crops cleanly. (See live production with PTZ cameras for setting up repeatable shots.)
• Leave room around the speaker. A slightly looser medium shot gives the crop room to follow small movements.
• Avoid tight framing on one side. If the speaker is on the left third for a nice horizontal composition, a centered crop may cut them off. You can shift the crop later, but you can’t recover a shoulder that isn’t in the frame.
• Watch the headroom. Too much space above the head looks odd in vertical; cutting off the top of the head looks worse.

Pastors who walk

Some preachers pace. That’s part of their style, and nobody should change how they preach for a camera. But it helps to:

• Have a camera operator follow smoothly with the medium shot instead of switching to a wide shot.
• Use a PTZ preset for the spot where the pastor usually lands for key points.
• Tell the pastor that the moments they deliver from one spot are the ones most likely to become clips. Many will naturally plant their feet for the big line.

What else gets cropped

Anything near the edges of the horizontal frame won’t make it into a vertical clip:

• Lower thirds and lyrics placed at the left or right will be cut off. That’s usually fine, since clips get their own captions.
• Sign language interpreters standing to the side won’t be in a centered crop. If your church provides interpretation, consider whether vertical clips should include the interpreter, and frame a version that does.
• Scripture slides behind the pastor may be partly cut. Burned-in captions carry the words instead.

Square clips are more forgiving

A 1:1 square crop keeps more of the frame than 9:16. For feed posts and moments with two people (an interview, a baptism), square is often the better choice. Make vertical and square versions of the same moment, and use whichever fits.

How Reels handles framing

Reels (formerly Worship Clips) renders each clip in vertical (9:16), square (1:1), and horizontal (16:9) from the same source, with captions and your branding. For vertical and square, you can adjust the horizontal position of the crop, so a speaker standing off-center isn’t cut in half.

Good framing on Sunday still matters most. The crop can only work with what the camera captured. Five minutes of conversation with your camera operators about “keep the pastor in a medium shot with room around them” will improve every clip you make this year.

Next: captions for sermon clips.