What is Clips - Apple's new video editor

The company does not have its own Instagram, but it does not want to lag behind the trend for mobile videos on social networks.

On the evening of April 6, appeared Clips, an application for creating videos from Apple, in the App Store. Its creation became known back in March, when the company announced the red iPhone 7 and the new iPad. Editor-in-chief TJ spent a week with a test build of the application and explains exactly what Apple did.

Too long or too easy

Until now, video editing has gone to two extremes. When it was necessary to make a more or less complex and beautiful video, I had to turn to a desktop computer with advanced software. You had to upload recorded video from a camera, camera or phone onto it, then do editing, the duration of which is usually measured in hours. For beginners this is a high barrier to entry.

Social networks have now adopted a different approach: record a video from your smartphone and publish it immediately, without transferring it anywhere or editing it. This is fraught with the other extreme: the videos turn out to be primitive, but the entry threshold is low - everyone has smartphones and a couple of minutes of time.

The popularity of let’s plays, the growth in the number of vlogs, the priority given to videos on social networks and “Stories”, which have already filled almost all major services, all indicate that video is the main Internet format. And although Russia has now abandoned unlimited mobile Internet, it is still cheap, and even from a smartphone you can watch and shoot a lot of videos.

But Apple almost completely missed the wave of growing popularity of video on social networks. Apple made no attempts to create its own platforms for distributing user content and limited itself only to auxiliary tools.

The company has always had two main video editors - the professional Final Cut Pro and the amateur iMovie. Due to its complexity and price, Final Cut Pro cannot be widely used, but with iMovie the corporation tried to achieve maximum simplicity and accessibility: the program was successfully ported to iOS and made free for new devices with sufficient memory.

However, although iMovie is positioned as a tool for housewives, it is still difficult to compare in terms of simplicity with the tools offered today on social networks. It still remains a program where you need to import videos and edit them, even if it is intended for mobile phones.

On social networks, you want to do everything on the spot, publish it immediately and quickly collect views and likes.

Over the past year and a half, a lot of tools have appeared for creating videos tailored for social networks. First MSQRD, then Prisma and their analogues surprised how third-party applications could gain popularity due to unusual effects. Mobile social networks - mainly Instagram and Facebook - expanded the list of tools for editing videos, introduced “Stories”, and added interactive stickers.

In parallel with this, a video boom occurred among online publications. To create them, entire teams and departments are formed (more recently there is one in the “Committee”): they make complex, polished products, spending money, time and effort.

Although you can’t do anything extraordinary with Clips, it allows you to quickly cut videos for social networks using the features of BuzzFeed, Prisma and Instagram. And at the same time it’s free.

For lack of your Snapchat

Clips is a fast mobile video processor. Here you can put together a video about anything in a minute: show the adventures of a cat, wish your subscribers good morning, or even quickly edit a tiny film, adding dynamism with the help of animations and effects.

The same thing can be done in other applications. Moreover, in the now popular “Stories” format, editing is generally contraindicated due to the limited time available for recording. Clips won't help with the vertical format of stories, at least not yet: it can only make videos with a square proportion.

If you use other applications, the functions will have to be assembled in parts. Neural network filters will need to be taken from Prisma or Artisto, but you will have to wait for processing there: although there are only two such filters in Clips, they are applied in real time. However, when using them, the iPhone heats up faster than a frying pan: the application puts a full load on the processor.

Stickers, inscriptions and other “stuff” in Clips are not the main thing, but they look cute and are stylishly animated, although not without the usual stock gloss for iMovie. If you don’t overdo it in using them, you can effectively stand out from the rest of the videos in your feed.

You can compose not only videos, but also photos in a video. By holding your finger on the button, you can select the duration of how long to show the photo, and at the same time record audio through the microphone.

A striking feature is adding subtitles over videos via voice transcription. Due to the fact that the main social networks (VKontakte, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook) play videos automatically, but with the sound turned off, there is a huge demand for dubbing speech in the form of subtitles. In addition, many people watch videos in situations where the sound cannot be turned on (in a noisy subway, at a lecture, or at work).

Typically, in video production, subtitles are placed manually. In Clips, this can be done programmatically and in real time: you can immediately re-record a passage if the service recognized a phrase incorrectly (for some reason I was unable to correct the text manually). Because of this feature, the application requires internet access.

Clips can recognize not only English speech, but also Russian. Including swear words.

You can put music on top of the video: it is organically mixed with the voice accompaniment and does not interfere with listening to the author’s speech. The Clips library has several dozen music tracks without words for different situations (cheerful or melancholy, guitar or electronic), but you can also use your own music.

There are no restrictions here - everything that is available in the Apple Music library can be added to the video. However, when publishing on social networks, copyright claims may arise from the sites themselves, so you should be careful in choosing the soundtrack: for example, on YouTube and Facebook, videos can be deleted or the sound in them can be turned off.

By default, Clips offers to publish the resulting video on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or Vimeo. The final video is created in the .mov format and has a resolution of 1080 by 1080 pixels - this is exactly the resolution of pictures on Instagram, so Clips is ideal for this social network, although it reduces the quality of the video. But on Facebook, Vimeo and VKontakte the video will also be published in Full HD.

On the evening of April 6, Clips was released in the App Store (don't count on the appearance of a version for Android). In this video you can see how it works.