Turn a lesson into a shareable clip
You already know the moment. Somewhere in an hour of teaching, you said the thing perfectly - clearly, in your own words, exactly the length a clip wants to be. The old way to get it out meant scrubbing through footage, guessing at timestamps, and opening a video editor for fifteen seconds of footage. Now that your lessons are searchable (Where do I say that? Search inside my own lessons), turning that moment into a clip is the next short step, not a separate project.
How it works
- Search for the moment. Ask where you talk about the topic, the same way you'd search a lesson to find it. You get the lesson and roughly the minute.
- Pick a shape. Vertical (9:16) for Reels, Stories and TikTok; square (1:1) for feed posts; widescreen (16:9) for anywhere a landscape video belongs. Set roughly where the clip starts and ends - a few seconds either side of the moment is usually right. Want the clip to lean in on a detail - your hands, the glaze, the corner of the canvas? Say where in the frame it is ("zoom in on the bottom-left while it plays") and the clip eases in on that spot and back out again.
- Captions come free. Every clip burns in captions from the lesson's own transcript, so it reads on a muted feed the same as it plays with sound on.
- Download and post it yourself. The clip renders in the background; once it's ready, download the file and post it wherever you already show up - see What should I post, and where? for picking the right place, and How do I get more from Instagram? for making the most of it once it's there.
One honest note: bernard makes the clip, it doesn't publish it anywhere off-site. Posting stays yours (Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, wherever your audience is), the same as it would be for a clip you cut by hand.
Two close cousins, while you're here: the same moment-picking builds a trailer for your course's public page (Give my course a trailer), and the traffic runs the other way too - a Reel you've already posted can come back as a course lesson (Turn an Instagram Reel into a course lesson).
The prompt
“Find where I talk about [the topic] in my [course name] course and make a [9:16 / 1:1 / 16:9] clip of that moment, about [15] seconds long, with captions burned in.”
Press Copy, then paste it into your AI and fill in the [bracketed] parts. First time? Connect your AI to bernard first - a one-time setup in bernard → your site → Use your own AI.
Questions people ask
- Can I turn a lesson into a video clip?
- Yes. Search your teaching for the moment you want - the same search that finds a moment in a lesson - then ask for a clip: vertical (9:16) for Reels and Stories, square (1:1), or widescreen (16:9). It renders in the background and you download it when it's ready.
- Does bernard post the clip for me?
- No - bernard makes the clip; posting it is up to you. Download the finished file and share it wherever you already post, same as any other clip you'd make yourself.
- Do I need to add captions myself?
- No, not normally. By default every clip gets captions burned into the video, taken from the same transcript that already exists for the lesson (see the 'captions and transcripts' page) - there's no separate captioning step, and you can turn that default off per clip if you want a plain video instead. One honest exception: if the lesson itself has no transcript yet (still processing, or transcription hit a limit), the clip renders without captions even with the option checked - check the lesson's captions status first if that matters for this clip.
- What happens while it's rendering, and does it need approval?
- Rendering runs in the background - you don't wait on the page. It doesn't touch your live site, so there's nothing to approve; the finished clip just appears in your downloads list when it's done.
- Can the clip zoom in on a detail?
- Yes - tell bernard where in the frame the detail sits ("the bottom-left corner", "the centre") and the clip gently pushes in on it and eases back out. It's a smooth zoom on the existing footage, not a re-shoot, so it works on any lesson video. Like every clip, it renders in the background with nothing to approve - it doesn't touch your live site.