If you’re a Mac owner, this might be the best book writing software for you. While you do have to pay $39.99 per year to use it, the cost to use Ulysses is completely justified. One of the best features has to be the distraction-free capabilities.
. Social videos are convincing, and they resonate with users; this is good news. Many brands, however, still struggle to create high-quality, professional videos that they can share on social media as a strong representation of their brand. But with the incredible technology available today, we have more resources than ever before to make this task more manageable. We wrote this post for the first time in 2016; it included only five video editing apps. We updated it last year, adding six new (at that time) apps. But a lot has changed and improved since then– including some of the apps we’d initially written about!
In this update, we’re going to look at 16 of the best video apps and software for 2018 that will cover all your video editing needs, along with some best social video practices. Social video has never been so much essential to online marketing. It’s automatically more engaging and dynamic than plain-text posts or even posts with images, meaning it can more effortlessly grab a users’ attention. Videos can also be more persuasive marketing tools.
This is backed up by statistics, which show that:. believe that visual assets (including video) are essential to how their brand story is communicated. Customers would beto watch a video about a product instead of reading about it. Mobile social video views have skyrocketed each year; by 2020, it’s expected that will be video views. Viewers will retail about after watching it through video, as opposed to just 10% when reading the same message in text form. The video editing apps and tools on this list offer a wide range of different features. Some are excellent video editors, while others have unique peculiarities like the ability to create incredible time-lapse videos or play with 50’s inspired comedy reels.
We selected both mobile apps and professional-quality desktop editors, and different price ranges (from free to a few hundred dollars). Between these 16 tools, you’ll be able to create every video you’ve ever dreamed of, even if you have little to no experience. FilmoraGo Filmora is known for its incredible video editing software, so it’s no surprise that their video editing app maintains that high standard. This app allows you to trim a video clip, create subtitles and text, speed up the content, add filters, and add overlays.
You can add music to the video, which will play in the background. You can also add different themes, like a Charlie Chaplin theme, which adds relevant visual effects and, in some cases, music. FilmoraGo is free but has in-app purchases you can choose from. It’s available for both iOS and Android, and it’s easily one of the best video editing apps out there. Magisto is an easy-to-use editing app.
Their goal is to turn images and videos into stories in just a few seconds. This app can enhance your videos in a few quick clicks. Once you choose an image or video, you’ll select an “editing style,” with options including real estate, memories, storyteller, dance, and more. Each will come with music suggestions, but you can add your own music from your library or get music for commercial use. It combines these features with your video to help you achieve the effect that you were going for, giving your video an extra added touch. Magisto is free for both iOS and Android users, though they have a business plan that allows you to reorder movie scenes. Adobe Premiere Clip is another one of our best video apps that comes from a big-name editing tool.
Unlike the full desktop version, this app has more simplified features. It still accomplishes its mission to help users “create, edit, and share” videos. They have two editing styles that you can choose from when you get started. Their automatic editing option will quickly generate a clip based on your uploaded video, where you customize the pace of the video, the music, and the order of clips. Their freeform editing lets you trim the video clip, sequence it, and edit it manually.
Like other tools on this list, you can add in the music of your choice from your library, and you can share the video with the app’s community if you want to. Adobe Premiere Clip is a free app, and I think it’s effective without needing to upgrade to any of the paid plans if you’re looking for an app that will help you edit easily and quickly. 4. Overvideo is the only video editing app on this list that is only for iOS devices, so Android users may want to skip this one. If you want to add subtitles to your video (but don’t want to do so on every social platform separately), this app is my best recommendation. You can add text anywhere to a video, and determine how long it will appear on the screen.
This tool also has some great additional features, like the ability to add music and adjust the text and opacity of the text block. The paid version of this app lets you edit your video a little more thoroughly, including with view cropping and clip trimming. LapseIt is a simple but excellent editing app that I love. Timelapse videos can perform really well on social media; they grab your eye quickly, and they are effective at showing something that takes space over an extended period of time. LapseIt lets you shoot a new video through the app or choose an existing video from your gallery. They have some amazing editing options, including an exceptionally user-friendly clip trimming system.
You can add music and filter effects, and you can also choose how quickly you’d like your video to progress. Once you’re happy with your video, you can upload it directly to social media sites, including YouTube. The basic LapseIt app is free for both iOS and Android, but their pro version is only $2.99. This version comes with added features and lets you produce higher resolution videos. Quik is an incredible video editing software created by GoPro, and makes it easy to create social-ready videos in a few minutes or less.
You can add images (up to 200 of them), videos, and music to your video with just a few clicks. It even has some great features that you won’t see from other video editing apps, like the ability to auto-sync music.
Quick will also automatically analyze the images and videos you’ve uploaded to select the best moments, but you can also choose to pick them manually. You can add text (with fonts of your choice), emojis, and slide titles. This is easily one of the best mobile editing apps when it comes to ease of trimming and reordering clips of images and videos. It’s the only mobile app that I always use to edit the actual video content. Quik also has excellent social sharing options, along with the possibility to share your video with text or email. It is currently available for,. Vizmato If you’re looking for a quick video editing tool, is a good choice.
It lets you record videos in-app in HD from either rear or front-view cameras, or use videos from your phone’s library. Vizmato lets you add themes, filters, and visual effects to your videos to make them interesting, exciting, and diverse. Some of these effects would be particularly helpful for, especially since you need to have all the video’s editing done before you upload it to Facebook’s ad system. Like other tools on this list, Vizmato has one-touch social sharing to several different platforms, including Vizmato’s own video feature portal to help your content gain additional visibility.
Vizmato starts as a free video editing app, but upgrading gets you additional features. A per-month subscription is $.99 (USD), and a year subscription is $9.99. It’s currently available and is. Cute CUT I’ve used when I needed to create Instagram Story Ads quickly (but make sure you choose the portrait view). It lets you draw right onto the video, and you can add drawings, shapes, and text to only the specific segments of the video that you want.
This is extremely helpful. While it does have features that allow you to trim or reorder clips, I’ve found Quik’s to be a little more intuitive and user-friendly. Cute CUT has excellent drawing features—particularly the pro version—which is what I’d recommend it for. Cute CUT has a Base app (which is a free video editing app) and a Pro app, which is only $5.99. If this is an app that you see yourself using often, go for the Pro version. In-Shot App is another one of those great, easy-to-use video editing apps that you can use on the go.
You can upload videos and then add music, voice over narrations, text and emoji overlays, and time them all to appear at the right time and for the exact desired length. Another advantage of using this one? There’s a decent library of royalty-free music that artists have donated, which you can use in your marketing content without paying a penny or worrying about copyright. The learning curve is not high on this tool, which is nice if you’re looking for something to turn content around very quickly, but this also means that the functionality isn’t quite as high as other tools on this list. So, if you’re looking for something really simple and fast to say, help create videos for Instagram Stories, this could be a good one. Otherwise, I’d likely recommend other tools on this list. PowerDirector Video App can do a lot, and it can do so while delivering fantastic quality: including 4k videos with hardware support.
This is something that not a ton of other apps on this can do, so that’s a huge advantage. If you want your content pulled up on YouTube on a fancy big-screen TV, after all, the ability to have your videos show up in 4k will not only make them more enjoyable to watch, but it’ll make your brand look exceptional and highly qualified, too. PowerDirector has excellent voice over capabilities that are really easy to use, even for beginners. Also worth noting is their chroma key, which can layer color effects over an entire video to quickly change the color effects and the feel of the video itself. Their chroma key works better than other “filters” on similar apps, which sometimes don’t translate to the HD high pixelation that can make your videos seriously look outstanding.
PowerDirector also features fantastic blue screen and green screen capabilities, so you can place yourself in somewhere new and do something exceptional with your video content. Other cool features include:. Video collages. Voice/ sound fading effects. Advanced background editing 11. KineMaster is all about precision editing, and you can actually trim videos at a frame-by-frame granularity and then immediately preview them to see how they look. This app also gives you a lot more flexibility with layering than some of the other options here.
You can add layer after layer of text, graphics, images, and even handwriting on top of your videos to get the exact desired effect that you’re going for. This makes design a lot easier in the long run if you’re creating more involved videos with multiple texts or graphics.
There’s also green-screen support, which is extraordinary. In addition to being able to carefully adjust color, brightness, and the video clips and their speed, you can also fine-tune the audio on your videos within this app. You can even edit the audio separately from the video itself, giving you more control and making things a little easier. This app is available in both the and on The Pro Edition of the app is $39.99, and well worth it. LumaFusion I spent a lot of time in writing communities and kept noticing that some of my journalists friends kept mentioning something called over and over again. When I asked about it, they told me it was their go-to choice for video editing on the go, mainly when they were in a place they couldn’t bring their laptops.
This multi-track mobile video editing app is extraordinary and powerful. It has undo/redo functionalities (which not all other apps do), and it covers the basics like trimming clips, duplicating content, adding transitions, and more. You can also stack different images and video clips on top of each other, making more interesting and dynamic videos. I like that this app also has several different UI layout templates that you can use to more easily create gorgeous, professional quality videos very quickly.
I’m also a fan of the audio features that comes with LumaFusion. My favorite might be the ability to adjust audio levels while you’re actually listening to it, which makes it easier to get it right a whole lot faster. Their royalty-free audio library doesn’t hurt either and will save you a lot of time and effort (and potentially lawsuits) while you can improve your video with music. Right now, LumaFusion is only available for iOS, though you never know if that will change. It costs $19.99 (well worth the price) and can be downloaded Best Desktop Video Editing Software With the increased emphasis on—and necessity for—video in marketing, having reliable, high-quality video editing tools is a necessity.
While the above should have you covered for social posts, there are a few editing tools I also wanted to include. The following tools will help even amateurs like me assemble professional-quality videos for your social media, product pages, and landing pages so you can represent your brand the way it deserves. They’re all desktop apps for full potential functionality and precision, and though they cost more than a mobile app, they’re all worth every penny. 13. Shakr While some videos like explainer videos may work best when created by a designer who is working on custom animation, most videos that brands use on social media and their landing pages merely need a little help to take it from an “I shot this on my iPhone” look to something that looks professional. Is the tool I recommend for these brands. Shakr has an enormous library of video design templates that businesses can use to assemble gorgeous, high-quality marketing videos quickly. Some of these templates are designed for specific purposes, like or those geared towards restaurants.
These designs have all been proven to provide high conversion rates, and are fully customizable; you can add your own images, video clips, and text. A subscription even allows you to use their commercially licensed music for your videos and gives you access to a library of stock photos. Pricing starts at $79 per month. Camtasia For a short period of time, I was hired to edit and assemble videos for a marketing company. I used the entire time, and I just used it a few weeks ago when recording a training video for a new employee.
If you want to record or heavily edit the technical side of a video that you already have, this would be my go-to choice. You can record videos using screen capture or your computer’s camera, and you can edit video files you’ve already created.
Camtasia has outstanding video editing capabilities, including:. High-precision clip editing and reordering. The ability to remove audio from video and edit them separately, or to add a different voiceover narration. Rich animation features. Camtasia costs $199 for lifetime access (though you may need to pay for upgrades in the future when they’re released if you want them).
It’s available for both Windows and Apple devices, and it’s incredibly user-friendly on both. Bonus use case: I also use Camtasia to record client calls that happen through my computer when my phone’s TapeACall wouldn’t work. You’re welcome.
Premiere Elements 15 For those who prefer Adobe photo editing and are digitally and artistically talented, may be your video editing tool of choice. It has better visual editing (as opposed to clip editing) features.
You can, according to one of their videos, literally “turn a frown upside down” with their video editing features designed to adjust facial features. Some of their unique features (aside from the facial feature adjuster) include:. Shake reduction, which can help make a video shot with a shaky hand less noticeable. Dynamic, dramatic effects, including text effects. Effects that will actually move in the video (for example: if you had a thought bubble, it could follow its subject as they move) Premiere Elements 15 has a ton of incredible editing features, allowing you to edit every aspect of your video.
It’s currently on sale for only $89.99, so I’d start your free trial now and invest if you think it’s the right fit for you. Final Cut Pro X has some insanely cool features, and if you’re looking for an all-out, does-everything-you-could-possibly-need video editing tool, this is the one to choose.
It’s only available for Apple, but if you have a Mac, you need to check this one out. It, of course, can tackle everything that you’d expect like trimming video clips, adjusting audio, adding voice-overs, and editing or creating effects– everything that the other tools on this list can help with, and it does so flawlessly. This includes advanced color adjusting, and the ability to create closed captions and add them to your video with ease. What really makes this tool unique is its stand-out features, including:. 360-degree video editing that helps you straighten the horizon, remove camera rigs, and more. Multi-cam editing, which lets you sync up to 64 different angles of video with frame sizes and frame rates.
Studio-quality 2D and 3D titles, which can be added to all videos (including 360-degree videos). VR headset playback, so that you can watch your 360 videos in real time from your VR headset. Ability to edit HDR (high dynamic range) video There’s a for Final Cut Pro X, and it costs $299.99 if you choose to purchase once the test period is up. Final Thoughts: Social Video Best Practices The video editing apps and tools discussed above can help brands of all sizes to create social videos that their audiences respond to. Regardless of which tools you use and what kind of videos you’re making, there are a few best practices that can provide better results. These include:. Keep it brief.
Though there are exceptions to this, brevity is preferred for most social videos. Some platforms like Twitter have strict time limits, so keep that in mind. Always have a CTA. Each video you create is made to accomplish something.
Add a CTA at the end of every video (bonus points if it’s clickable!) to encourage users to take that desired action. Add subtitles. Some platforms are heavy on autoplay videos, which start without sound, so adding subtitles can help grab their attention.
Subtitles are also necessary for users who may have hearing disabilities, or for those who are watching in an area where they can’t play the video with sound. Stick to a single message. If you want to get your point across, stick to a single, concise, simple message. You want there to be one story, one emotional impact, and one takeaway.
Most importantly, there should only be one CTA. What do you think?
Have you used any of our best video editing apps? Did I miss your favorite? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below! This is a very nice list, but let me suggest to add 3 superstar services: Animoto – helps you personalize your online videos, our clients use to edit and turn their footage into professional videos. Use once a month or so when you have footage you quickly want to put together and share. Animoto.com Promo By Slidely – Our go-to video tool at the moment, saves all the hassle and allows you to create and share quick marketing videos (perfect for video ads) WeVideo – for your deeper video needs, a semi-pro online tool for specific video needs, for control freaks and aspiring video directors.
I would also mention biteable, shaker and vidiad, all nice additions. For us, as a business and our clients, these 3 provide the best overall value.
I was coming off a tumultuous year that started with a daily commute into Chicago for my old job and ended with me working from home. As the year came to a close, I was exploring what that meant for the way I work on the Mac. That process continued into 2018. With the number of new things I took on in 2017 and the transition to indie life, I made the conscious decision to step back and settle into my new life. That wasn’t easy. There’s a natural tendency to take on everything that crosses your path when you go out on your own, but I’ve seen too many people fall into that trap in the past. Instead, I concluded that 2018 would be the year to improve the way I already work by refining existing workflows and reevaluating how I get things done, including on the Mac.
Three events led me to work on my Mac more in 2018. The first was I bought in January. It was a big step up from the 23-inch 1080p one I had before and, combined with a VESA arm, improved working at my Mac substantially. The second factor was our. For it, we produced that were released in the span of one week, which kept me in front of my Mac recording and editing for long periods of late May through June. Third, just after WWDC, I destroyed the screen of my iPad Pro thanks to the trunk hinges that invade the interior of the 2016 Honda Accord. I decided to hold out for the new iPad Pros, but that meant writing for four of the busiest months at MacStories without a good iOS work solution.
I used a current-generation 9.7-inch iPad some, but it couldn’t compete with my LG display. As 2018 comes to a close, the changes I’ve made haven’t been dramatic despite the extra time I’ve spent in front of my Mac.
Instead, I’ve fine-tuned existing workflows and added new apps for specific tasks. Below, I’ve broken down the 49 apps I use roughly by activity and function. I’ll mention where Apple’s apps fit into my workflow as I go because without them there would be a few big holes in the landscape of apps I use, but the focus of this roundup is on third-party apps, not Apple’s.
Table of Contents. Writing I spend more time typing into a text editor than any other task on my Mac or iPad. However, writing involves much more than typing. Research and editing are part of the process and involve their own specialized apps.
Throughout 2018, much of my writing workflow has remained the same, but it’s been expanded with the addition of new apps that have made my writing life better overall. Research Every story involves some degree of research. A lot of that occurs in Safari, but that’s not the only source I use, nor is it how I manage the research I collect. RSS is where many of the news stories on MacStories originate. It’s also the source of many of the links in the that we create each week for Club members and ideas for episodes and other writing. Reeder is my Apple news hub.
The RSS client landscape on the Mac has seen better days. While innovation and frequent updates are the norm on iOS, RSS readers on the Mac have barely changed in recent years. Reeder is no different. Except for a handful of new features and bug fixes, the app has remained largely the same for three years. Still, of all the options available on the Mac, Reeder remains my favorite.
I appreciate its simple, three-pane design and the reader-friendly customizations that are available. The app also features a long list of third-party app integrations that allow me to send links to Safari Reading List, Yoink, Keep It, Instapaper, Things, Ulysses, and more. In August, the developer of Reeder announced that. It’s not clear if that includes both the iOS version and Mac version, but I hope it’s both because RSS readers on the Mac need more attention. DEVONthink played a major role in researching and other App Store anniversary coverage. One of the first things I did to prepare for the project was a review of every post ever published on MacStories and tagged ‘App Store.’ Everything useful that I found was dumped into DEVONthink as an offline webloc file with a topic tag. Next, I branched out to other sites, combing mobile gaming sites, major media outlets, and developers’ blogs.
That too was dumped into DEVONthink. Once I was satisfied with the ground I’d covered, I began reading what I’d saved and chasing down other leads. As I went, I cleaned up and further categorized articles and highlighted passages with information I wanted to cite in my stories. When I was finished, I had several hundred highly-organized, annotated articles covering the App Store’s history, which I used as reference material while I wrote.
I also used DEVONthink’s powerful search features to find materials in the collection and find new, related material on the web. DEVONthink is perfect for this sort of big, unwieldy project. Still, my use of the app barely scratches the surface of what DEVONthink can do, especially on the Mac where it can effectively replace the entire file system. Unfortunately, not all of the functionality available on the Mac works on iOS in, including the highlighting functionality, which left me tied to my Mac more than I wanted to be for this project. That said, if you need to organize and search a lot of data, you can’t go wrong with DEVONthink. Although I found DEVONthink indispensable for a project the scale of our tenth-anniversary coverage, it’s more than I need most days.
That’s why I began using Keep It on Federico’s recommendation. Research materials for most writing projects consist of a mix of links, text, documents, and screenshots.
All of that gets stored in Keep It with a ‘research’ tag and a tag that identifies the project. It’s a fast, low-friction way to file information that’s easy to find later.
Periodically, I go through and delete old materials that I don’t think are worth keeping and archive the rest. Organizing MacStories research and other reference materials in Keep It. Keep It has also become a place for reference materials, manuals, notes on long-term projects, recipes, and links to gear I may buy. These are all things that Notes could handle, but I like the addition of tagging and saved searches that Keep It offers. I still use Notes for its sharing feature and as temporary storage for links and other information as I come across it, but if I have several disparate bits of information about a topic, it usually ends up tagged in Keep It where I can find it all again easily.
First Drafts. I started using Ulysses in early 2016 and haven’t looked back. Its display of Markdown isn’t for everyone, but the app has exactly the tools I need for my writing and little more. About the only part of the app I never use is the panel on the right-hand side where you can add tags, notes, images, and writing goals. I organize stories into three groups: MacStories, Club MacStories, and AppStories. As I work on something it lives in these groups, but after publication, it gets moved into an archive group.
I also like that I can tweak the UI to look how I want with themes and publish straight to MacStories using the WordPress integration, but all of that power stays out of sight where it doesn’t compete for my attention until I need it. Ulysses is where everything published on MacStories lives. That’s not to say there aren’t places that could stand improving. For example, I’d like an option to view linked images on our CMS directly in Ulysses. Placeholder boxes for images don’t convey information that distinguishes one from another and previewing the HTML of a document requires too many steps.
Still, Ulysses is a comfortable writing environment that I’ve made my own with a theme I like and the fonts I prefer. Best of all, the features that are most important to me are all available in the iOS version and sync is fast and reliable.
I’ve used Drafts on iOS for a long time but was always held back from using it as much as I wanted by the lack of a Mac app. Now, a Mac version is on its way and in a beta on iOS can try.
The app isn’t finished, but the early going is very promising. Sync is fast, and even without feature parity with the iOS app, merely having my documents available on both platforms has taken me from being an occasional user of the app to using it multiple times a day across both platforms. I’m not writing most of what gets published on MacStories in Drafts. Instead, Drafts has become the home of everything else. One big category is templates I modify each week to prepare the metadata for AppStories, along with its show notes, the AppStories link post that will go on MacStories, and promotional materials for the show and its sponsors.
Longer email messages often start in Drafts too. Other times, I use it as a scratchpad for temporarily storing ideas, lists, and tasks. There's no one way I use Drafts, but by tagging notes and using workspaces, I keep a collection of templates and other text organized by each of the major areas of work I do.
Links Blink for Mac. When Apple discontinued its affiliate program for apps, it eliminated 90% of the affiliate revenue I earned. What’s left is barely a blip on the radar, but it’s so easy to create the links, I haven’t abandoned affiliate linking entirely. Some readers may recall that I used to sell an iOS app called Blink that generated Apple affiliate links.
I pulled that from the App Store when Apple discontinued affiliate linking. Blink for Mac never shipped.
Less well-known is that I was less than 24 hours away from launching a Mac version of Blink when Apple ended app affiliate linking. Without app affiliate linking, it didn’t make sense to release the Mac app either, which was a big disappointment. Even so, the app is one I still use every day. Apps are no longer available in iTunes and Blink for Mac serves as a quick way to find them, copy URLs, and research things like pricing and release notes. I realize it’s a little odd to include an unreleased app in a round-up of ‘must-have’ apps, but when I’m on my Mac, it has become an app I rely on heavily, which is why it’s on my must-have list. One of the drawbacks of Ulysses is that once I’ve exported it to traditional Markdown and shared it using GitHub where changes might be made by one or more people, Ulysses’ special flavor of Markdown makes getting the document back into Ulysses for editing troublesome.
The easier route is to make final tweaks in a separate text editor that handles traditional Markdown directly. Switching apps is also an excellent way to look at a story with fresh eyes, which is how I use iA Writer. Editing a story by Stephen Hackett in iA Writer. IA Writer has some of the best typography of any text editor I’ve used. The overall design is clean and legible, which makes it great for editing.
Moreover, the app integrates well with iCloud Drive, allowing me fast access not only to my documents on both iOS and the Mac, but other team members’ work through the file provider on iOS and and the Finder on the Mac. Although I miss the customization possible with Ulysses, iA Writer is a close second when it comes to apps I enjoy writing in.
I started using Grammarly in late 2017, and it’s stuck ever since. The app is a grammar checker that works surprisingly well. It’s not a replacement for careful proofreading and editing, but it has caught enough typos I might have missed that I consider it an essential part of my writing process for longer stories. The downside is that the Mac app is a slow, non-native Electron app and that is a poor substitute for the full Mac app. Fortunately, Grammarly also offers a web app that works reasonably well in Safari on iOS if you load the desktop version of the site. We use GitHub as a collaborative editing tool at MacStories.
It allows us to track changes that any of us make to someone else’s story and either accept or reject them. It’s a fantastic system on iOS thanks to. On the Mac I use GitHub Desktop, which isn’t nearly the pleasure to use that Working Copy is. GitHub Desktop doesn’t have all the features that developers often need, but it works well for plain text, and because it’s the glue that keeps me in sync with the repos I share with the rest of the MacStories team, it gets a spot on my must-have list.