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Review: Videorama – video editing and cinematic effects

Videorama makes it easy to turn your home videos into slick movies

Price: Free
Version: 1.0.2
Size: 78.2 MB
Platform: iPhone & iPad
Developer: Apperto Ltd

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The duo behind App Store hit Typorama have taken the principles which made the text-on-photo app so popular and applied the same approach to video editing. Videorama makes it a breeze to trim, crop and arrange video clips straight from your iPhone, and includes plenty of cool overlays and special effects to make your videos more exciting. It’s a little movie studio that fits in your pocket.

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The main interface is slick and sensible

Videorama is reasonably intuitive, with a timeline of clips and effects along the top of the screen, menu options along the bottom and a preview of your masterpiece dead center. To compare editing capabilities with Apple’s first-party offerings, it’s a big step up from the basic trims available in Photos, but not as complex as the more fully-featured iMovie. It’s easy to navigate the timeline with swipes, and rearranging clips is as simple as dragging them into the right order. A secondary view offers additional options for clips, including crops, audio levels and color levels. As an editor, it’s decent without being mind-blowing.

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Individual shots can be tweaked from a sub-menu

However, the basic edits are only half of what this app has to offer – its main selling point is the range of excellent special effects that can be layered over your clips. The computer-generated effects are easy to drag and drop into a scene, although they tend to look a lot more realistic when overlaid onto steady clips shot on a tripod. The full range of VFX includes explosions, weather effects, confetti hearts, explosions, magic spells, bloodsplats, and more explosions. The effects are great fun to play around with – especially if you’re shooting an amateur action movie – but a more diverse range would be welcomed.

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Just an average day… plus explosions

Besides the VFX, there’s a good range of music clips and sound effects available to add to your movie. The music selection includes nice soundtrack-style tracks covering classic movie genres, or you can import your own songs from iTunes. The sound effects pack include some great cinematic whooshes, audience reactions, trumpets, drums, and it somehow manages to include short clips from licensed songs, which are well chosen for humorous impact.

Adding text overlays is another nice feature, clearly inspired by Typorama. You can edit font, color, placement and even choose an animation. As a small nit-pick it would be nice if these animations could be previewed rather than chosen on name alone. The app also includes a range of fun overlays and Instagram-style filters, which can really add something to a video but frustratingly can only be set as tweaks to the entire movie, not individual clips.

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Layering text and VFX can be pretty amusing

Videorama manages to nail a few things that rival apps sometimes miss: movies can be portrait, landscape, or square; auto-save ensures you never lose progress, so you can finish an edit later; and everything can be output and easily shared in full HD. Disappointingly, though, the app completely disregards the need for scene transitions – even the humble crossfade is missing in action here. You can’t trim video clips from the timeline view and you can’t trim audio at all.

Though the app is free, it makes its money by selling additional content as in-app purchases. Most users will at least want to spend the $3 to remove the watermark from finished videos. Beyond that there are a series of fun add-on packs for $1 each, which for many users will be worth picking up to extend the app’s longevity. Rest assured there’s just enough included here in the starter packs to keep you busy for free, but a broader range of effects and sounds would be nice. Perhaps we’ll see more packs released in future.

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You’d struggle to find effects like this for use in conventional editing apps

This is a great app for knocking up impressive and silly effects, easily shareable to social networks. For more serious editing jobs there are better options out there, but Videorama certainly earns its place on any budding movie-maker’s device with its quality effects and overlays. If you like explosions, it’s a blast.