Videolicious is a dead simple iPhone video production app. I’ve been “playing” with it for about a month and can now say for certain, there is a place for this app in my content creation toolset. But it has a few limitations.
First, let’s look at the upside.
It’s ridiculously easy to use. Once you select the template you want, Videolicious walks you through three simple steps. In step one, you select the video files or photos you want to include in your production. Each production is limited to a combination of 10 photos or video clips.
Step two asks you to “Film yourself and talk about the videos and photos in your movie.” In truth, you don’t have to video yourself. You can point the video at anything you wish, but this video is what becomes your voice track in the final production. These videos are limited to 50 seconds.
Step three requires that you choose a song for the background track of your video. Several songs are provided royalty free for use with Videolicious. Once you hit select, the movie begins to render and automatically saves to your camera roll upon completion. That’s it. You’re done. Some templates allow you to share directly from the app to Facebook and YouTube or via email. Some, however, only allow submission to certain places within the app. For example, the “Lucky Magazine” video template only allows sharing to Lucky Magazine via email. Of course, since the file is already saved to your camera roll, you can do anything you with with it from there.
Now for the downside.
As I state in the video example above, the main downside for me is that you can’t record the voice track video and import it at step two. The recording for step two must be done in the app, during production. So if you’re not good at hitting your marks in one take, this will likely be very frustrating for you. In addition, if the app crashes, as it did for me during several trials, you lose whatever work you’ve done, including that voice track it took you so long to get right. I think the app would be much better if you could record this segment, make sure you have it right, then upload in the production process.
The template choices don’t seem to matter. While there are a slew of templates to choose from, I don’t see a significant difference between the styles. The cuts in the video clips are slightly different, but I could just as easily have chosen “Video Thank You Note” or “Real Estate Listing Video” as the templates for the sample video embedded above, instead of the one I chose, “My Day in Video.” They would all look basically the same. So, don’t get caught up in trying to find the “right” template for any video you create with Videolicious. The differences simply aren’t worth the effort.
I like Videolicious.
The downsides are not huge for me personally. I do see a place for this in my content creation toolbox. For producing a quick wrap up of a day’s activities, or a quick review of just about anything, this is a painless solution. With a little forethought, the final results could be quite good. Plus, it’s a FREE app, so the only thing you have to lose by downloading it and seeing for yourself is a little time. I think it’s worth a shot. I’ll be using it more. If you’ve used it too, I’d love to here your thoughts.
Note: Most of my crashes occur when trying to produce a video with 10 still photos as the basis for the video. It takes a great deal more processing power to turn a photo into a video than it does to splice existing video together. My bet is that if you keep the number of still photos you use on the low end, you will greatly reduce your chance of crashing the app.
Here are screen captures of the apps main screens.
Great comprehensive post. I really appreciate the warning of the production pitfalls. I just downloaded this and haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, and you’ve definitely explained it concisely enough so I won’t waste time getting up to speed. I appreciate it! Thx!
Then my work here is done. Yes, the limitation to do the voiceover video while in production is a big one, in my opinion, if you wanted to use this consistently for higher quality work. But for what the app does, enable a quick 60 second overview… it’s hard to imagine it being much simpler. Just don’t get fooled by all of the different templates. You’ll find yourself saying, “I’m not feeling the difference.”
Thx 4 the heads up on this, Jeff. I like it, too 🙂 (I am subscribed to you in Google Reader, btw)
Isn’t this something much better suited to iMovie?
Not sure the iPhone is really ideal for multi-track video editing. Some things just go better on a desktop.
The beauty of the app is that is does all of the “editing” for you. Again, it’s not for every circumstance.
Hi Jeff I just downloaded the app and will give it a try, I love iMovie and use it often, but would love to see how this compares to it.
Always staying above the curve..Thanks for the heads up!
I don’t have any shots to choose from when I open Videolicious and start a project. It’s not syncing with my camera roll or photos. I can’t get past Step One anymore. This app has no menus or tutorials for iPad(2). Is it something in my iPad settings?
As a general rule, in situations like this, I delete the app. Hard reboot the phone after deletion, and then reinstall the app. It’s possible it did not install properly.
I really loved the idea of using this app for quick hotel/destination reviews, however the part of my videos that show me speaking (intro and closing) are pretty blurry and don’t come close to looking as sharp as yours. Is there some way to improve this?
Jeff, can I save the video I created on my computer? I emailed it to myself but there wasn’t a file attached, just the video in the message. I wanted to send it as an attachment.
Sheryl, I would save it to your photo album and import it to your hard drive as you do any other video or photo you shoot with your mobile phone.
Hi Jeff,
I don’t like that I can’t use an edited photo from the camera roll. I’ve used photos from the internet that I’ve saved into my camera roll. But if I want to cut out that pesky trademark logo from the top of my image, whenever I crop it, Videolicious always uses the original image.
Did you run into this problem?
If you edit the photo in another app, like Snapseed, you won’t have that problem. It’s only when you use the non-destructive editor built into the photo app on the iPhone.
Hi Jeff,
Have you had any problems with the photos that you used? When choosing the photos in the videos, I notice that the photos that are close are cut off in the video, while the ones that are bit far away are fine. Any ideas for how to fix this problem?
Thanks!
How do you delete Videolicious? Please Help
Nick, where are you attempting to delete it from and on what platform? Just dragging it to the trash on most modern systems should do the trick.
Hi Jeff, a couple of media editors tested Videolicious. Their first run took about ~3+ hours to complete the video. Although the app worked well enough, the cost quoted for our needs was very high. Do you know of any comparable or better alternatives?
No, I do not.
Hi Jeff, any way to remove thr ‘Videolicious’ logo at the end of my clips?