Review: Game Your Video App

If you thought video editing was just a game for professionals we'd ask you to think again. With the advancement in today's technology and the development of user-friendly apps on devices called smartphones, a professional's game isn't a professional's game anymore. Keeping this thought in mind, we review an iOS app for you called Game Your Video. The theme of the app is "Stop editing videos, start gaming them!" So lets take a closer look at all the features this app has to offer.


Features and Performance

Game Your Video is a simple video editing app that not only lets you edit videos once they have been shot, but also lets you add effects to videos while you are shooting them from your iOS device in real time.

The interface of the app is really simple. Choose an existing video from your library to add effects to them by choosing "Game Your Video" or choose "Game Your Video Live" to shoot a video from your device and add effects as you shoot in real time. Both the options are really easy and fun to use.



Navigating through the editing options too is very simple. All the functions are laid out at the bottom of the screen and you can simply touch to add the desired effect.

Choosing a theme for you videos is very simple. You can select a "Flavour" for you video, which is essentially a theme. There are 11 themes to choose from - Chaplin, Haunted, Movie, Old Look, 8mm, Funny talk, Comedy and Audience. Each flavour has its own soundtrack that can be overlaid with the video and if the pre loaded options doesn't match your taste, you can choose from your existing iTunes music library.

Each flavour has a different colour palette to it. For example, if you choose the "Chaplin" flavour, you get a granny black and white visual (representing the Chaplin era) or if you choose the "Movie" flavor, you get a 16:9 look with a sort of saturated colour theme.



Apart from choosing from the list of flavours, you can also add motion and audio effects to your creations. The visual effects include, echo, jitter, lens, mirror, inset, zoom, RGB Splits, shake, spin, flashback and more.

Some audio effects, and these are a real treat to work with, include, slow speech, fast speech, chipmunk, echo, scary and baby.

One disadvantage to this app is that if you would like to use the themes soundtrack or music from your library after the video has been shot, the video overlays the existing sountrack eliminating natural sounds and voiceover, if any. This is a real bummer and we wish the audio channels for the recorded audio and adding music were different. The device is a native iPhone app and hence stretches when used on the iPad 2.

Other editing options include "Cut" and "Joining". Cut simply lets you eliminate sections of a video that you would like to remove. The down side here is that there are no transitions such as dissolve or swipe and hence, some cuts end up looking like jump cuts. Join on the other hand lets you merge multiple videos. You can simply click the videos to select the order and voila! Your movie is ready!



With social networking being all the rage these days, there is an easy option to upload the videos to YouTube and Facebook with the simple click of a button. All you need to do is sign in with your respective account and hit upload.



Verdict

For $1.99, Game Your Video is an interesting app with a wide array of features to choose from. You don't need to be a professional editor and there isn't a steep learning curve involved to understand all the features. Whether you are an amateur who wants to have fun with an iOS devices camera or a person who wants to capture memories with some funky effects or someone who wants to make interesting home movies with an iPhones camera, this app is definitely worth the investment.