How EBENEZER works
What this covers: What actually happens between pressing Process and getting your clips back — why it takes as long as it does, how clips are chosen, and what that score means.
A five-minute read that saves a lot of guessing
You don’t need any of this to use EBENEZER. But when something looks surprising — four clips instead of six, a low score on a clip you love — this page is where the answer is.
The ten stages
Press Process and your sermon goes through ten steps. The progress page names each one as it happens.
- Checking the video file — making sure it opens and has usable audio.
- Sending the audio off to be transcribed — one to two minutes for a large file.
- Writing out every word — the long one. Roughly a minute for every ten minutes of video.
- Researching keywords — so the blog post can be found in search.
- Reading the sermon for clip-worthy moments.
- Working out exact start and end points for each.
- Cutting the clips out of the video.
- Adding captions, your logo and the title card.
- Making thumbnails.
- Saving everything so it’s ready on the review page.
Everything downstream is built from the transcript, so nothing can start until every word is written out. A forty-minute sermon spends roughly four minutes there. Cutting and captioning the video takes real time too — each clip is rendered twice, once to cut it and once to burn the captions in, which is what keeps the words in step with the speech.
You can close the window. Processing runs on EBENEZER’s servers, not your computer, so shutting the laptop won’t stop it.
How many clips you get
Every sermon produces:
- Four to six short clips — between twenty seconds and two minutes each, for social media.
- Two to three extended clips — eight to fifteen minutes each, for YouTube.
Those ranges aren’t a quota to fill. If a sermon has five moments that genuinely stand alone, you get five. Two excellent clips are better than five forgettable ones, and EBENEZER is built to behave that way.
What makes a moment clip-worthy
Before anything is judged on quality, it has to clear three practical bars. It must run long enough to be worth posting, it must make sense to someone who didn’t hear the rest of the sermon, and it must be a complete thought with a beginning and an end — not a sentence sliced out of a longer argument.
Whatever clears those is then weighed on three things together:
- Theological substance. The heart of it. A clear statement about God, the gospel, or how to live — something with weight.
- Whether it lands on its own. Does it grab you in the first few seconds and pay off by the end, with no setup needed?
- Whether anyone would share it. Quotable, memorable, the kind of thing someone sends to a friend who’s having a hard week.
Personal testimony, plainly stated truth, a well-told illustration, and moments of gospel clarity tend to rise to the top. But nothing is excluded for not fitting a category — a strong moment that’s hard to label is still a strong moment.
What the score actually means
The score puts clips in order. It is not a grade, and there is no pass mark. Nothing was thrown out for scoring too low.
A clip showing 42 is there because it was among the best moments in that sermon. It is not a warning. Watch it before you judge it by its number.
Use the score the way you’d use a running order: if you only have time to post two clips this week, start at the top. But watch the ones further down before you write them off. Scores measure how strongly a moment reads on paper. They don’t know that the story at minute thirty-one is about someone in your congregation.
Why one sermon gives fewer clips than another
The usual reason is the shape of the preaching rather than the quality of it. A sermon that builds one long argument across forty minutes has fewer places you can cut cleanly than one that moves through distinct points. A narrative sermon that carries you along can be wonderful to sit under and still be hard to excerpt — take ninety seconds out of the middle and it needs the ten minutes before it to make sense.
Short sermons also produce fewer extended clips, simply because eight to fifteen minutes of continuous teaching has to exist before it can be cut.
If a sermon you thought was strong yields only three clips, that’s usually what happened. It isn’t a judgement on the preaching.
Why short and long clips look different
Short clips are cropped tall for phone screens, carry your logo, open with a two-second title card, and have captions burned in word by word. That combination exists because of how they’re watched: sound off, thumb moving, three seconds to earn attention.
Extended clips keep your logo but skip the captions and the title card. They’re for YouTube, where somebody has chosen to watch, the sound is on, and YouTube supplies its own captions and channel branding.
What one sermon costs you
Processing a sermon uses one sermon credit, and only when it succeeds. A run that fails costs you nothing. See billing and sermon credits for how many you have and how they renew.
The troubleshooting guide covers the specific things that go wrong, with what to do about each.