Apple's New Clips App Wants to Make It Easy to Create Multi-Clip Videos

Apple has announced a new app called Clips, which aims to simplify the process of creating videos by combining video clips, photos and music that you can easily share with friends through the Messages app, or on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, and pretty much everywhere else.

Clips comes with a feature that Apple is calling Live Titles, which lets users create animated captions and titles using just their voice. Captions are generated automatically as a user speaks, and appear on screen synced with the user’s voice. Users can mix and match different styles, and tap any title to adjust text and punctuation, or even add inline emoji. Apple says Live Titles supports 36 different languages.

“Clips gives iPhone and iPad users a new way to express themselves through video, and it’s incredibly easy to use,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Apps Product Marketing. “The effects, filters and amazing new Live Titles we’ve designed for Clips let anyone make great-looking, easily sharable videos with just a few taps.”

Apple says users will be able to touch and hold a single button to shoot live video and photos, or choose existing media from the Photo Library. They can then add artistic filters, speech bubbles, shapes or emojis/ full-screen animated posters. Users can also add full-screen posters with animated backgrounds and customisable text. Clips will offer "dozens" of music soundtracks to choose from, that will automatically adjust to match the length of a video.

When sharing a video with friends in Messages, Clips will be able to suggest who to share with based on the people who appear in the video, and the people a user shares with most often.

Apple says Clips will be available on the App Store for free beginning in April, and will be compatible with iPhone 5s and later, the new 9.7-inch iPad, all iPad Air and iPad Pro models, iPad mini 2 and later, and iPod touch 6th generation. Devices must be running iOS 10.3.