During the past few weeks, I’ve talked with my colleague Ren LaForme about two video tools: one for making videos interactive and one for shooting with your phone.
We’re going to stay with easy things you can do yourself with video for a bit longer.
What’s our tool this week?
The first week we talked about this really cool tool to take video out of the standard click-play-stop format, and then we talked about Filmic Pro, which is a great way to shoot high-quality videos on your phone. This week, I thought we could talk a little about the piece that connects those, which is video editing.
So, I want to talk about my favorite phone video editor, which is called Videoshop.
Cool. How much is this and where do we find it?
Videoshop is $1.99 on the App Store and completely free if you’re an Android user. I’m a little salty about that as an iOS user, but two bucks is two bucks.
Related Training: Video Essentials: Shooting, Sharing and Storytelling
Tell us more about this. What can we do with it?
There are a lot of video tools out there for any type of phone you might have, and I think they all come with video editing tools as stock. iMovie’s fine. It gets the job done, but it’s never really that pretty. It’s always kind of a clunky experience. Videoshop is such an easy experience. You open the app and it says, “what clips do you want do you want to use in this video?” You can import any videos from your phone — photos, too – and then it just puts them all in this timeline. You can add them to different spots, arrange them, trim them.
I really like the voice-over feature. I find voice-over on a lot of other apps to be lackluster. This one just works well.
There’s also the ability to add sound effects or music. I know some people out there like to put music over their stuff, which, you know, can be fraught in journalism but works for some things. You can change the speed, it has a built in Ken Burns effect, you can change the aspect ratio. It also has transitions.
The one feature on here that I think a lot of people will be really into is subtitles. A lot of people have been asking “how do I make those videos like NowThis, that one minute, 30 second video with the text so people don’t have to turn on the sound?” Videoshop, with its subtitle tool, lets you do that really easily.
Also, if you’re making a video on your phone and putting it on Facebook, you can export it straight to Facebook.
You never have to do anything on your laptop or desktop?
Right. Everything’s probably going to be easier if you do it on your laptop or desktop. But it’s also going to be more expensive, it’s going to be time-consuming. And honestly, we spend so much time sitting around fiddling on our phones anyway, you might as well do it and be productive.
I see all these videos on Facebook that are presented horizontally, but they’re shot vertically on phones. Then they have this kind of hazy background, like a ghost video. Does this tool do anything to help make that a little less ugly to look at?
I think Facebook automatically adds the ghost video when you upload a vertical video, but with Videoshop or Filmic, you can pick the aspect ratio you want and put something else where the ghost video would be. You can put a snazzy background or photos or something like that.
Is there anything that you don’t like about this or you wish worked better?
Video editing on a phone is still sort of a less powerful experience than video editing on a laptop. I occasionally find myself a little hamstrung. I wish there were a few more features, but I think that’s asking a lot from an application on your phone.
As somebody who has lots of kid apps on my phone that take up lots of space, I need to know — does this take up a great deal of space?
It doesn’t take up a ton of space. It’s not in my 15 or 20 space-hogging apps. I looked them up the other day, and Pokemon Go is like number two. So, I deleted that.
Videoshop doesn’t seem to take up a whole lot of space. But you know what does? iMovie. That thing takes up a whole lot of space.
I’m going to delete iMovie and Pokemon Go right now. Look at that. Anything else we should talk about?
I suspect the people who are shooting and editing video on their phones are either the people who don’t have access to a big camera/computer/video editing repertoire, or are intimidated by it. In either case, I think these tools can really help you get acclimated to those things and set you up to succeed on those things when you can afford them or when they make more sense to use. So it’s sort of like a step between not doing video at all and going all in.
We’ll share one more video-related tool next week and then head in a different direction for awhile. Have you used any of the tools we’ve talked about so far? Show us your work, we might gather and share it!
