ON YOUR PHONE

Even on a big, fast phone or tablet like a Samsung Galaxy S7 or an ipad Pro, editing without a mouse and keyboard or the ability to pull up several windows makes the process glacially slow. Use phones only for very, very short videos or for practising.

Splice (free) Slightly more intuitive than the imovie app, which saves screen space (and adds confusion) by hiding tools and menus. It also provides a builtin library of free-use music, which can be unexpectedly difficult to find.

Adobe Premiere Clip (free) This program offers more options than Splice or imovie, including quick-access functions like slow-motion, but it can take multiple steps to do something that takes one click in the desktop version.

TURN YOUR PHONE SIDEWAYS

Unless you’re in Snapchat, where horizontal is annoying, videos are better in landscape mode. No one wants to see those black bars. You should know this by now.

EDIT MORE

Attention spans are short. So when you’re cutting a video, start a scene the second the action begins or with the first syllable spoken. Great videos are concise.

THROW IN SOME B-ROLL

A little B-roll of city traffic or a time-lapse sunrise (both of which can be found for free online) works well at the beginning of nearly any video. Try it. Cutting down two hours of vacation footage into a watchable three-minute highlight reel takes some time. For one thing, you have to skim through the original footage to find the good parts. It also takes trial and error as you shift the specific placement of each clip. Moving things by one or two seconds or cutting too quickly into the next scene can change a moving moment into an unintentionally funny one. A two-minute video might take hours for a beginner to produce. You’ll get more efficient, but it takes time.

TRANSITIONS

Fade to black. Nothing else. (See right.)

TITLES

Instead of layering the titles over an image, give them their own frame, on a black background, at the very start of the video.

SLOWMOTION

Only if someone falls down (and is eventually found to be unhurt).

FILTERS

Instagram lets you apply the same filters on video as you can for photos. Unless you’re putting together the final project for your drama class, use them sparingly.

Videos can be between three and 15 seconds. Longer videos can be easily trimmed within the app.

If you have a Gmail address, you already have an account. Otherwise you’ll need to make one. Youtube offers both private and public ways of sharing. Private videos require an invitation. Public videos can be found by anyone. If you make your videos public, you might want to turn off comments, just to be safe. Commenters don’t always understand auteurs.

A smaller audience than Youtube, but this site attracts a higher concentration of professionals. Think: fewer cat videos, more Vice- caliber Web shorts – and even polite commenters! A couple thousand rand gets you a year of Pro membership, which means 1 040 GB of video storage, bandwidth priority for high-resolution playback of your videos and no ads. All users, Pro or not, can password protect their videos to limit access.

There’s no upload function. You shoot videos in increments of ten seconds or less, typically in portrait mode. After that you can apply filters, illustrations or change the speed of the video. But you can’t make cuts. The only real editing is deciding what to shoot and for how long.

Google lets you save an unlimited amount of 1080p videos, which is good enough resolution for most users. Dropbox gives you 2 GB for free, or you can get 1 TB for a small fee. With either, you can send out a unique link via text or email to allow others to watch, even if they don’t have an account with the service. The big drawback with Google Photos is that uploading files waives your copyright. That’s not a good thing if you’re an aspiring professional or someone who doesn’t like even the remote possibility of his family vacation showing up in a Google ad.