This month Apple introduced its new app for iPhone and iPad called Clips. Apple's Clips allows you to create fun videos that you can share with friends through Messages, Instagram, Facebook and other popular social networks.
With Clips, users can create multi-clip videos without any complicated editing tools. Just hold the record button to take videos and photos, or add them from your Photo Library. Users can then add filters, speech bubbles, shapes and emojis.
One of the coolest features of the Clips app is Live Titles. With Live Titles users can record themselves speaking and captions are automatically generated, appearing on screen perfectly synced with the user’s voice. Here's a couple of people trying out the Live Titles:
First time using #AppleClips and I'm totally hooked - automatic live captioning as you speak? Yes please 👍🏻 Accessibility for the win. pic.twitter.com/JtEtyv9ALW
— Craig Smith (@wrenasmir) April 9, 2017
Case closed I guess? #AppleClips pic.twitter.com/tAtxH3MeOs — Will Goldstone, Esq (@willgoldstone) April 9, 2017
Live Titles has a few different styles to choose from so you can really make a video your own, but to be able to use them you have to be online. Live Titles is something you won't find on other apps. The captions can be edited by tapping on them as they pop up when playing back the video. The automated captions aren't perfect, but it's great to see Apple making their new app accessible. It's definitely a step in the right direction, but does take some patience to get the most out of it.
The recent reviews for Clips have been mixed, noting some cool editing features, but many mentioned having difficulties navigating the user interface.
"Impressive voice-transcribing autocaptioning works really well... Menu layouts can be a little confusing to learn at first. Audio editing is limited. Captions and audio can only be recorded when clip is added." - Scott Stein - CNET
"Most of the video I shoot on my phone goes straight into a messaging app like Snapchat, Messenger, or increasingly Instagram. While you can export video from Clips into any of these apps (easily with Messenger or Instagram, awkwardly with Snapchat), they all have video recorders built into them already. They may have far fewer features but they also require far less steps." - Henry Cooke - STUFF
We decided to give Clips a try in our offices with Charlie the puppet.
Overall, Clips is a fun app to play around with. Currently there aren't any major video-making apps other than Clips that have the automated captions feature. Clips gives users the ability to post straight from the app to sites such as Facebook and Instagram, so it hasn't been designed to replace any social media apps. Which is a good things considering it would have some stong competition with Instagram Stories and Snapchat. Ultimately, Clips is a fun video-editing app in a simple package for anyone to use - you just have to figure out how.
Clips is free and available for download on the new iPad, all iPad Air and iPad Pro models and iPad mini 2 and later, or on iPhones from the 5s onwards. You need iOS 10.3 or newer for Clips to work.
