What is a facecam?

A stream is 16:9: the game fills the screen and the facecam sits in a corner. A 9:16 crop keeps about 32% of the width, so cropping the middle loses the face and cropping the face loses the game. Clippers use one of four layouts instead:

• Facecam over the game. The webcam across the top in a 1080 × 608 strip, the 16:9 shape of the webcam itself, and the game in the 1312 pixels below: on a 1920 × 1080 stream, the middle 46% of its width, where the action and the crosshair usually are. It's the standard for gaming clips, because the reaction is half the clip.
• Half and half. Two 1080 × 960 panels, face and game the same size. It suits a moment where the streamer's face tells the story.
• Face only. Just chatting and IRL streams have no game to show, so the clip is cropped on the streamer like any talking head video.
• Game only. No facecam, or a moment where the play is everything: crop to the action, or fit the whole screen.

Captions go on the seam between the facecam and the game, where they cover neither, and well clear of the bottom of the frame the apps cover (see safe zone). To lay out one clip by hand, the free split screen video maker stacks the webcam over the game in your browser; for every clip of a whole stream, see stream clips.

If you stream and want clips, of your own or from clippers, the way the facecam sits on screen decides how well it lays out:

• One corner, all stream. A webcam that stays the same size in the same place can be cut out the same way in every clip. Clyper looks for exactly that: one small face that stays put in a corner.
• Big enough. The strip is 1080 pixels wide. A webcam box narrower than about 540 pixels on a 1080p stream has to be enlarged more than 2× to fill it, and a face blown up that far looks soft.
• Shaped like the strip. A 16:9 webcam box fills it edge to edge. A round or square frame leaves game showing around the face.
• One face. With a guest on a second camera, there's no single facecam to cut out, and the clip is better framed on whoever's talking.
• Action in the middle, and talk through it. The game panel keeps the middle of the screen, so a minimap at the edge is lost. And the moments that get clipped are the ones a streamer reacts to out loud.

Clippers paid to post a streamer's moments work from the stream's replay, the VOD, and keep the facecam in the clip: the streamer's face is what fans follow, and it shows whose stream it is. Clip only streamers who've asked for clips, through a campaign or their own program (see which streamers pay clippers), and name them on every post. The whole routine is in how to clip streams.