Stream clips

How do you put the facecam on top of the gameplay?

A stream is wide, with the streamer in a small box in one corner. A plain vertical crop either keeps the game and loses the face, or zooms onto the face and loses the game. The layout that works on TikTok stacks them: the camera in the top third, the gameplay filling the rest.

Why a straight crop does not work on a stream

Three things go wrong when a stream is cropped like any other video.

The face is tiny

On a 1080p stream the facecam is often a tenth of the frame. Cropped to vertical and blown up, it is either cut off or the size of a stamp, and the reaction is the reason anybody watches.

The game loses its middle

A crop that follows the streamer drifts toward the corner and cuts the action in half. Viewers see a sliver of the screen and a lot of background.

The camera moves

Plenty of streams switch layouts, or cut between two streamers' cameras by who is talking. A layout set once for the whole clip is wrong half the time.

Same stream, two clippers On the left a straight vertical crop. On the right the facecam is lifted to the top and the game keeps the rest of the frame.

The steps, by hand or automatically

In an editor like CapCut it is four steps. SnapDub does the same thing on its own.

  1. Put the clip in twice. Two copies of the same footage on two layers, in a 9:16 project.
  2. Crop the top copy to the camera. Mask or crop it down to just the facecam box and scale it to the full width of the top third.
  3. Crop the bottom copy to the game. Keep the part of the screen where the action is and let it fill the space under the camera.
  4. Check every cut. If the camera moves or the stream switches scenes, fix the crop at that point. This is the step that takes the time, and the one SnapDub does by finding the camera in every frame.

When the layout is the wrong choice

Not every moment wants it. If the clip is the streamer talking straight to camera, a full-screen face is stronger than a split. If the clip is a play with no reaction worth seeing, the game should have the whole frame. The split is for the moments where the reaction and the gameplay are both the point.

Coming from Twitch? See Twitch to TikTok. And for how the crop decides who to follow in the first place, here is the test.

Questions

Facecam layouts

Can I do this on my phone?

Yes, CapCut on a phone has layers and masks, but it is slow work on a small screen, and every scene change in the stream means another fix.

What if the stream has no facecam?

Then there is nothing to lift, and the clip should simply follow the action. SnapDub only uses the split when it actually finds a camera on screen.

Does it work with two streamers?

Yes. When a video cuts between two people's cameras, each stretch gets its own layout with the right camera on top.

Is the split better for views?

Nobody can promise that. It is the layout viewers already know from the biggest stream clippers, and it keeps both the reaction and the game readable on a phone.

Paste a stream, get the clips with the camera on top

SnapDub finds the moments, finds the facecam, and builds the layout for every clip.

Clip a stream