Clips
Shoot and edit videos, then add effects
Free Developer Apple, apple.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 10.3 or later
Apple’s relationship with social media seems a little bit uncomfortable: you get the impression that the company knows it’s important, but somehow just can’t bring itself to fully engage.
Clips might just change that. It’s not, as some have suggested, a competitor to Instagram or Snapchat – it doesn’t feature an integrated social network, for one thing – but it does provide a very easy way to make great-looking videos and share them on the former network, as well as on YouTube, Facebook, and, of course, Twitter.
Where iMovie puts the emphasis on powerful editing controls and features, Clips is all about doing things quickly and easily, so you can share the results. It isn’t as spontaneous as Snapchat or Instagram, because you’ll need to do some fairly light editing work to get the best from it – but it’s close.
Clips’ standout feature is the ability to turn words you speak into the iPhone’s microphone into text on-screen. You can then choose to have the text accompany the audio, or have just one or the other. It works
reasonably well, and you can edit the text to correct any errors. Once the text says what you want it to say, there are a number of different styles available for presenting it.
Automatically converting speech to text may be the app’s most impressive feature, but Clips has plenty more to offer. Open the app and you can choose to shoot video, add a clip from your Photos library, or use one you’ve already imported. It’s here you’ll run up against Clips’ major limitation: it only supports square videos. If you import one in widescreen, it will be automatically cropped to fit. On the plus side, there’s no problem with importing videos stored in iCloud – the app downloads them automatically.
The tools for recording video live are easy to grasp. Just hold a finger on the big red button in the middle of the screen for as long as you want to record. Audio is recorded automatically, but if you don’t want it, just tap the microphone icon to mute the iPhone’s mic.
Adding a clip from your iPhone’s library uses the same workflow. So, in addition to tapping “video,” navigating to the clip you want, and then adding it, you must hold the red button as the video plays in order to import it – almost like using an old tape-based recorder. This also applies to the animated “cards” that you can add between clips.
It’s an odd workflow decision, especially given that you can actually trim clips later, but perhaps Apple made it this way to encourage more spontaneous editing.
Clips rewards time spent getting to know it; poking around reveals features and tools that aren’t obvious. Whether that’s enough to persuade the Instagram generation to put in a little effort rather than use the video tools in their favorite social media app is another matter.
the bottom line. Clips offers more power than video effects apps, but is easier to use than iMovie. With a little effort it produces great results.