Instagram Reels: How to Create TikTok-Style Videos

Missing TikTok? Instagram Reels is here to keep you entertained and to help you unleash your creativity via short videos. Now that TikTok has been banned, Instagram Reels has the opportunity to become its most popular replacement. We've already seen apps made by Indian developers, such as Mitron and Chingari, attempt to capture the TikTok audience and now the big guns are stepping in. Instagram is owned by Facebook and it already has millions of users in India. With Reels, it could be the most serious challenger to TikTok.

How to create Instagram Reels

Creating Instagram Reels is quite simple but the most important step is to get Reels on your Instagram account. Facebook is still rolling out Reels to people in India. At Gadgets 360, some people have the feature and some don't have it yet.

An account without Instagram Reels (left) and one with Reels

Creating Reels is quite simple if you follow these steps.

1. Open Instagram.
2. Tap the camera icon on the top-left.
3. At the bottom you'll see options such as Live, Story, and Reels. Tap Reels.
4. Now you can start creating Reels on Instagram. The maximum length of any video clip is 15 seconds at the moment. We'll walk you through all the options in the next few steps.
5. To record Instagram Reels, tap the big white circle icon. The same button lets you stop recording too.
6. Before you start recording you can add a few effects via icons on the left side. To adjust video recording speed the right arrow icon which looks like the play button. You can record videos in slow motion at up to 0.3x or speed them up to 3x.
7. To add effects to your videos, tap the smiley button and swipe right on the big white circle. This will show you all available effects and you can pick what you like. The effect icon shows up inside the big white circle and you can tap it to start recording.
8. Instagram Reels also allows you to set a three-second timer before recording any clip. Tap the timer icon on the left and set the duration for your clip (0.1 to 15 seconds) and tap Set Timer. When you start recording, you will see a three-second timer on screen before the video begins
9. Finally, you can also add music to it by tapping the music icon on the left. The best part here is that you can see the lyrics on screen and choose any part of the song that you want to use. TikTok allowed you only a specific 30-second clip for each song, but on Instagram Reels you have the freedom to pick your favourite parts of any track. You can add music before recording a video to create lip-sync videos, or you can add it after recording to give it a cool soundtrack.

That covers the basics of creating Instagram Reels.

Are you liking Reels? Will you abandon TikTok even if it comes back, now that Reels is here? Let us know via the comments.

Why do Indians love Xiaomi TVs so much? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.