Clips That Keep Your Layout

By Junaid Ahmed

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When I record an episode, my recording software gives me two files from the same take.

One is widescreen, for the full episode. The other is vertical, laid out for Reels and Shorts: both of us stacked, a name under each face, the show logo on top.

I spend real time getting that layout right. And until now, PodGlue ignored it.

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What was wrong

PodGlue made clips by taking the widescreen file and squeezing it into a vertical frame.

It could blur the sides, or crop to the middle, or let you drag a crop window around. All of those work. But every one of them throws away a layout that was already finished.

Crop to the middle of a two-person shot and you can lose a guest. Blur the sides and you get a small picture floating in a big frame. Neither one looks like the vertical file I made on purpose.

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What changed

Open an episode, go to Clip Moments, and there is now a card called Vertical recording (9:16).

Add your vertical file there. From then on, clips for that episode are cut from it exactly as it is. Your layout, your name labels, your logo, all untouched.

Because the branding is already in the video, PodGlue stops adding its own. The framing choices and the logo option disappear for that episode, since there is nothing left to decide.

Captions are still your choice. Everything else about making a clip works the same.

If you don't have a vertical file, nothing changes. Your clips are made the way they always were.

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A concrete example

I tried it on a real interview. The vertical file is about 50 minutes long, and it matches the widescreen file to the millisecond. I cut a 20-second clip from the middle.

The clip came out with the guest on top, me below, a name label under each of us, and the show logo above. It looked like the vertical file, because it is the vertical file.

One detail: my vertical file is 720 by 1280, smaller than the usual 1080 by 1920. PodGlue keeps it that way. Stretching a small video to a bigger frame only makes it softer.

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What's next

Two things I want to add.

First, a check that the two files are really the same recording. Right now PodGlue trusts you on that, and the clip times come from the widescreen file, so a mismatch would put a clip in the wrong place.

Second, getting those clips posted. Cutting a good clip is half the job. The other half is getting it onto every platform with a link back to the full episode.

The clip is where most people first meet your show. It should look like you meant it.

That's what I'm building PodGlue to do.