Apple Clips: Everything you need to know about the new, superbly easy photo and video app

The new quick video clip app has just gone live on the App Store

Of course, it’s true that we all use our phones to record video and shoot photos. The new Clips app lets you make professional-looking video clips in seconds that work brilliantly.

When you open the app, the selfie camera is up and running, ready to record when you are. You can shoot in portrait or landscape orientation as the result is a square piece of footage.

Choose Live Titles, an icon at the top left of the display, and when you press the red bar the app starts filming. This is the first bit of magic. As you speak, your words appear onscreen as scrolling captions, synchronised – perfectly – to your voice. Pause for a second and so do the captions, resuming on a new line when you start talking again. It’s almost like reverse karaoke and works especially well if a friend is viewing the video on Facebook, say, with the sound muted. You can even mute the microphone so no audio is recorded and it will still record the titles. There is also sound available in the form of a musical soundtrack, as we’ll see later.

You can add photos from your iPhone or iPad photo library, or shoot them from either camera. You can also apply filters, seeing in real time what the result will be. Filters include general ones and more extreme options that turn you into a comic book or an animated ink drawing.

There’s more. You can apply overlays so that words can pop up on screen to add more detail. You can drag the captions across the display until they’re in the right place, and then type in the words you want them to say.

Want to add an end screen, or start with one? Easy. A dozen options in the Posters section turn a quick video into a classily professional one with text you specify.

And you can even add a soundtrack – a selection of smart clips are included which cleverly format themselves to the length of your magnum opus. Clips appear at the bottom of the display and you can mute them, adjust their length and re-order them by flicks of a finger.

When you’ve finished, simply share the footage through Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and so on. Or use Mail. Or pick one of the contacts that Apple suggests – if your Live Titles mention someone by name, they’ll appear in a row of people on the Sharing sheet.

Let’s be clear, there are limitations here. Apple chooses the fonts, the video effects, the filters, the soundtracks. But there’s really no company on the planet with good taste that matches Apple’s. So it works because you’re in good hands.

It works with the new iPad, all iPad Air and iPad Pro models and iPad mini 2 and later, or on iPhones from the 5s onwards. You need iOS 10.3 (or the even newer 10.3.1) for Clips to work.

Apple is not the first to have these kinds of feature in a video creation and sharing app. But, typically, it has assembled the right techniques, effects and features to create a superbly easy to use and satisfying app.