How to Use Apple Clips

Apple recently launched an entirely new app called Clips. The name is pretty apropos, too, considering it allows you to take multiple short video clips and combine them together, add text or graphics easily and produce an end video super easily. But, as with Apple, there’s no instructions on how to use Clips exactly, so I figured I’d do a quick rundown and tutorial for anyone wanting to try this new app out.

The app is super minimalistic and simple actually, and opening it just opens directly to a camera that you can tap three options underneath to start getting content into the app:

• Photo – Lets you take a photo that you can then add to the end video as a clip by holding down the button for however long you want it to be shown after taking the photo. You can also move the photo, zoom in on it, etc. while holding that button and it’ll add those movements to the final video.
• Video – Which lets you hold down the button to put a video recording in for that duration.
• Library – So you can pick a photo or video and insert it into the end result by also holding down on the button to insert it for that length of time.

You can also tap on any of the clips once added to then have the option to turn off the sound from that clip using the speaker icon, trim the clip using the scissor icon, or deleting it using the trash can icon.

You can drag and drop the clips in the timeline at the bottom to rearrange them and push play to preview it.

And that’s the basic usage concept of the app, frankly. The rest of it is adding extra things to these clips or videos. Which it can do in some pretty easy and intuitive ways.

You can then add a few things to any of the clips, or the video as a whole, by tapping the icons at the top of the app:

• Message Bubble – This lets you add text to the screen in a number of different formats that you can preview. The coolest thing about this though is that you don’t have to type, you can just talk and it’ll add the text automatically.
• Three Overlapping Circles – This allows you to add filters to any of the clips in the timeline (photos or videos both work the same).
• Star – These are stickers basically and some are geo-specific (very similar to another app that has geofilters if we’re honest). You can also swipe over to get emoji stickers as well.
• T in a Box – The T is for titles. These are clips themselves that can be added into the video like titles in any other video editing program.

And then finally, you can add music over the entire video by tapping the music note at the top right corner and choose from Apple’s library of soundtracks or from your own library.

And that’s that, how to use Apple Clips. It definitely seems like an app out of left field for Apple to me, but the because of its normal Apple intuitive nature being baked in it’s an interesting take on a super easy to use short video maker. And frankly, being that I like Vine Camera and Snapchat and it feels like it’s combining a bit of both of those, I would maybe use it to make quick social videos on the fly.

What do you guys think of Clips? Have you used it, did you even know it was launched? And have you made anything cool with it, let me know in the comments below!