Modern day video editors can be daunting. While it’s better than the literal cut-and-paste practices of yesteryear, opening a new video editor can feel like stepping into the cockpit of a spaceship. Unless you’re trained to fly spaceships, in which case this analogy is broken (and also, you’re awesome.)
Looking to distill video editing down to its simplest form — a game like experience, they say — is Game Your Video, a new iOS app from Global Delight.
Here’s how it works: you pick a video from your library, and play it back. As it’s playing, you poke any of the myriad effect buttons (things like jitter, shake, spin, RGB splitting, or speed tweaks) sitting at the bottom of the screen to start the effect. The video keeps playing with the effect applied on the fly. Tap it again, and the effect stops. Don’t like the effect? Stop the video, drag back to that point in the timeline (which isn’t so much a timeline, really, but an iMovie-esque thumbnail summary) until the cursor is on top of the effect highlight, and tap a button to remove it.
The same effects can be applied in real-time to videos being shot through the app, using an identical mechanic: tap an effect to start, tap it again to stop. You can also pick songs from your iPod library as your video’s soundtrack, and cut/join clips with just a tap or two. Want to make your friends sound like a chipmunk (or an axe murderer)? You can do that, too.
It is really quite simple — at least in its overall concept. Some of the finer nuances of the UI can be confusing at times; it took me a few minutes to figure out, for example, that to edit videos you’ve already recorded you have to hit a specific “Game Your Video” button rather than the camera roll button sitting right next to it. None of it’s hard to wrap your head around — but given that they’re trying to make something for an audience daunted by other video editors, it’s probably worth fine tuning.
Here’s a quick video of my desk demo of some of the effects:
Will it turn you into the next Scorsese? Nah, but that’s not the point. It’s for adding cute little effects to your clips before tossing them up on Twitter or Facebook — and for that, it gets the job done.
Game Your Video launched this morning, and is going for $1.99 in the App Store.
