After the Battle

After The Battle from Ulina on Vimeo.

I finally uploaded the video I took on day 25 of my 100 days of black and white photos project, where I saw a hurt tiny snail. The driving force was actually that I was trying to clean up apps on my iPad mini.

When I got the iPad mini last year, I started adding apps that where taking up space on my iPod. At some point I just started downloading everything to my iPad mini, even if I wasn't actively using it. I still have a lot of free space on my iPad, but I don't want to keep it cluttered with apps I don't use. Especially, since the reason I was freeing up space was because I was transferring videos to it so I could use iMove or Pinnacle Pro to edit videos.

I use to think iMovie was king on iOS. I mean, at one point it was king. It was the only app that allowed near desktop experience video editing. However, Pinnacle Studio Pro now allows so much more advance features that iMovie doesn't seem to care to want to include. For example, I can add transparent photos over video clips in Pinnacle Pro and I can't do that in iMove. Being able to do this means I can add my own text on top of videos or even characters. In iMove, picture in picture means having another video on top and not a photo.

However, I didn't use either app to edit this video. I used Vimeo's app called Cameo. I didn't realize I had the app and I was going to delete it when I decided to test it out first. Cameo is a very limited app. You can add as many clips as you like. However, as far as editing features, you can edit the length of the clips, turn the sound off and on for each clip, add music, and add themes, which means adding filters to the video, and also choosing a font and color for the thumbnail.

There is a limited amount of themes and you only have a choice of three fonts to choose from per theme. You also can not move the location of the text on the thumbnail, which is why I set the video to private and then uploaded a new one after the video uploaded. The app is geared toward Vimeo, but it saves the video to your camera roll and you can upload the video to other sites or import into other apps.

The best thing about the app is that it has free to use quality music for your video. Music can make or break a video and finding one to match your video can be time consuming. The selection is not as big as I would have hoped, but it's a free app and I shouldn't be so picky. If the video is that important that I need more choices and I want to be able to customize how the music is used (because you can not do any of that in Cameo), I would just used iMove or Pinnacle Pro.

Even though it is limiting, I think the music option is what saved this app from being deleted. That, and the ability to modify the intensity of a filter. Pinnacle Pro doesn't have filters (they say it is on their backlog) and iMovie's filters don't look that great with no way of modifying the intensity. This means to get all the effects you want for your videos you will have to use several apps and then render the final movie in one app.

I noticed that Vimeo seemed to have lifted the 1 HD video a week restriction for free accounts. This must have been in the last couple of days, because in the beginning of November when I wrote about starting a new project, the restriction was still there.  They probably knew it was time to update their plans now that mobile phones can shoot in 4K.

I still have some other video related apps that are on the chopping block: Adobe Clip, Clips, Tempo, and Videolab (don't remember downloading this one). If they don't have a feature I can't get anywhere else, I'll delete it. There is no reason to have apps collecting digital dust. Maybe I'll do another post comparing them.

Do you edit videos? Do you have a favorite app that I didn't mention?