Today, YouTube introduced its first standalone mobile app, a point-and-shoot video recording and light editing app exclusively for the iPhone and iPod Touch called “YouTube Capture.” Now just about anyone can easily record a YouTube video without the expensive gear that amateur and professional videographers tend to carry around.
Since video editing programs like Final Cut Pro or Adobe’s Premiere Pro are expensive, complicated beasts to master, YouTube Capture has added some perks to the app to help make your iPhone videos into something that’s presentable, like image stabilization and basic color correction.
We checked out the app and found it to be no fuss way to record, quickly edit, and share videos to YouTube, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. When you open up the app, there isn’t a traditional landing page that you can access. Instead, it immediately opens up the camera with a red button centered at the bottom of the screen. To the left and right of the record button is the navigation. The gear button in the bottom left corner accesses your settings, while the bottom right button with the iconic YouTube play button opens up all your YouTube videos, those uploaded both before and after downloading Capture.
Citing ”Vertical Video Syndrome,” YouTube notes that Capture doesn’t actually allow you to begin recording a video until you tilt your phone horizontally, putting it into “landscape” mode, which prevents your recorded videos from having large black bars on either side of the picture. (You can turn this reminder off in the settings page.) Once you’ve recorded a video, the app opens up a new page where you can add a title, select the social networks you’d like to share your video to, or “enhance” (edit, stabilize, and color-correct ) the video.
If you’re editing a video, Capture enables users to correct the video’s colors automatically, and auto stabilizes the video for those of us with shaky hands. Sections of the video can be “trimmed” at the very ends of the clip. Capture doesn’t allow for full editing capabilities, but it does allow you to clean up your clip.
There’s also an option to add default music to your video from an assortment of “soundtracks,” including Dreams, Electronic, Happy, Melancholic, and many others. These are all free. There isn’t an option to add songs from your iTunes library, likely due to music licensing reasons. Based on our tests, we’d recommend that you add music to a video that has no sound, or else you’re in for a cacophonic mess. The music will overlap with the video’s sound, and right now there’s no way to edit the volume of the video only, although you can edit the volume of the soundtrack.
Video often takes a long time to upload, but you won’t have to worry about the upload process canceling should you navigate outside of the app; Capture will continue uploading behind the scenes.
Capture’s features are quick and dirty, and even simpler to navigate than competing apps, like Givit and Six3. But despite having fewer features than these apps, YouTube Capture is undoubtedly a very real threat in this sector.
Check out YouTube’s promo video for the app below:
