The Apple Clips video app is finally having its most famous feature: various aspect ratios. With the 3.0 upgrade rolled out today, Clips will capture 16:9, 4:3, and square — and do all three of these in either vertical or landscape orientation on both iPhones and iPads.
It's a long-overdue feature for Apple 's smart little undisguised video production software, which has only been shot and exported to squares until today. That may have made sense when it was first launched three years ago, but it meant that Clips couldn't really partake in the growth of vertical video story formats in apps like Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram.
The new edition of Clips also has a sophisticated gui. Where before you have to open an Effects pane and scroll horizontally through almost infinite possibilities, now the horizontal list can be swiped up to a full-screen view of all the filters, stickers, emojis, or any effects you may like to install.
Apple has put together a lot of new assets that you can use on your videos. There are title "posters" that you can put into your videos, more royalty-free tracks, more stickers, and more speech bubble forms.
Clips now capture and export in the Dolby Vision HDR implementation of Apple when you film an iPhone 12 with your rear camera. Apple has now updated the Clips share sheet. You can also upload directly to social apps, but Apple can add a different button in the video preview to upload the project file if you wish to give it to someone else for editing.
If you capture or import both landscape and vertical images, Clips would give a letterbox to one or the other by default. If there are more vertical clips than landscape clips in your project, the vertical video (and vice versa for landscape) would be exported.
At its heart, Clips is exactly as it was at the beginning: a really smart way to easily blend short videos into a bit of a shared movie.
Unlike story formats or TikToks, Clips doesn't have an interactive social network for uploading and streaming these videos — they're intended to be exported.
While it has some AR impact, such as adding speech bubbles to the forehead, it's just a little more conventional than other short-form video applications. In that way, Clips also looks a little like a new iteration of iMovie 's heyday.
Clips also maintains its strongest feature: the ability to live transcribe speech in order to create live captions directly in the video. The included music tracks still automatically adapt to the duration of the film. It also syncs between your iOS devices via iCloud, and can be shot or edited on your iPad as well. The iPad gui has also been improved — it supports the Apple Pencil "write" feature for text input, but sadly you can't draw videos directly yet.
To me, Clips is already a really safe app — a ton of it in Apple 's aesthetics. Apple also points out that it is common in educational contexts. It's a way for kids to make videos that look and sound like videos they're likely to watch on social networks, just within whatever safer bubble their classroom has for them.
The 3.0 version of the Clips is due to come out today.
