A bit of real-world Clips experience

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So I’ve been playing with Apple’s new Clips app, had a few thoughts.

First things first, I had zero expectations for Clips. My experience was almost universally positive. Clips is both easy to use and fun.

To get started, I downloaded Clips here. I launched the app, and immediately was in video creation mode, with the camera facing me. To start recording, press the big red “Hold to Record” button. Let go when you are done recording. Dead simple.

To add captions, tap the first of the four tool icons above the video pane (looks like a cartoon balloon). Drag up and down and select from 8 caption formats (bottom right is none). Now, as you record, your words are parsed and appear in your selected format, perfectly synced to your lips. This is really well done, perfect use of iOS’s speech-to-text engine.

The other tool buttons let you select a look (the video I post below was done using the Comic Book look), add a sticker (drag it around the frame), and a canned clip (I used The End in mine). You can also add music to the background and combine multiple clips into a single, exportable clip.

Here’s a quick sample I did, just to give you a sense of things:

Clips does a nice job packaging all this together in an easy to use format. I appreciate being able to share this to Twitter without having to render the video or stage it in some intermediary format or site. Of course, Twitter does impose a size limit here, so this only works with small videos, but I suspect we’re going to see a lot of these.

A few side notes:

  • Clips gained full access to my photos and videos without ever asking permission. Seems to me Apple is bypassing their own privacy rules here, though this might be standard for Apple’s own apps.

  • The Clips icon looks very similar to the FaceTime icon. Different colors, but close enough to make them hard to distinguish. My 2 cents? Apple should change one of them.

Bottom line, I love Clips and look forward to making more of them.