Jaydip PatelToday, Apple is releasing a small update to the Clips app that will let you add little animated Disney and Pixar stickers (Apple calls them “Overlays”) to your short videos. There are a handful of other new features, like a dedicated button for editing the “Live Title” transcriptions you can add to your videos and new “Posters.”
You’re forgiven if half of the above product references sound like random gibberish. Apple’s Clips app hasn’t broached the top of the App Store download charts very often (if at all) since its introduction this past March. So for the unfamiliar: Clips is essentially a new way to edit movies together on an iPhone (or iPad) that feels a little more native to a phone than iMovie.
It’s more powerful than what you can pull off in Instagram or Snapchat as a piece of video-editing software, but it’s essentially built of the same mindset. You shoot with your phone’s camera, then you take those short clips and add stickers and filters and whatnot, and finally stitch them together into a short movie. The similarities end there, though. Clips is a standalone app without a social network to call its own, so you have to export those movies and then re-import them to Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or wherever.
If you haven’t tried Clips, I encourage you to check it out. It’s a distinctly Apple-esque take on a mobile video-editing app, which means it’s a bit more polished than the rest. The new features only add to that consumer-friendly polish. Those new “Overlays” are essentially animated stickers, so you can have Mickey mug for the camera or Woody tip his 10-gallon hat in the middle of your scene. There are also the new “Posters,” which are essentially animated title cards. You can customize the text on them, too.
The most interesting thing in Clips, to me anyway, is the “Live title” feature. It live-transcribes whatever is being said in a video, either as you record it or after the fact when you’re editing it. It’s genuinely clever AI and something I wish every piece of video software did, if only because it adds to the overall accessibility of the video. In the new version of Clips, Apple simply added a button to edit those transcriptions; before you had to know that you could tap on the text as it appeared.
The new update to Clips should be available now for both iPhone and iPad.
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