smartfilming

Exploring the possibilities of video production with smartphones

Tag: KineMaster

#58 Shocking: The downfall of a brilliant mobile video editing app on Android & iOS! — 26. February 2023

#58 Shocking: The downfall of a brilliant mobile video editing app on Android & iOS!

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It’s time for another rant. As you might be well aware of, I’ve been a big fan of the Korean video editing app KineMaster (available for Android and iOS/iPadOS) which was the first video editor on Android that could actually be described as fairly „advanced“ – at least when judging it by mobile app standards. It launched in December 2013 and I still remember praising it in a presentation at the original MoJoCon event in Dublin in 2015. The UI was absolutely brilliant for touch screen use, it had a rich set of features to work with and it was also widely available for basically all Android devices. But ever since the original lead engineer and some team members left the company in 2017, development of the app has become very sluggish and mostly disappointing. Even darker clouds in terms of user experience have been accumulating over the last months…

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#38 How to anonymize persons or objects in videos on a smartphone – new app makes things a lot easier! — 16. January 2021

#38 How to anonymize persons or objects in videos on a smartphone – new app makes things a lot easier!

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There are times when – for reasons of privacy or even a person’s physical safety – you want to make certain parts of a frame in a video unrecognizable so not to give away someone’s identity or the place where you shot the video. While it’s fairly easy to achieve something like that for a photograph, it’s a lot more challenging for video because of two reasons: 1) You might have a person moving around within a shot or a moving camera which constantly alters the location of the subject within the frame. 2) If the person talks, he or she might also be identifiable just by his/her voice. So are there any apps that help you to anonymize persons or objects in videos when working on a smartphone?

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#37 Best video editors / video editing apps for Android (Update 2022/2023) — 10. January 2021

#37 Best video editors / video editing apps for Android (Update 2022/2023)

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Ever since I started this blog, I wanted to write an article about my favorite video editing apps on Android but I could never decide on how to go about it, whether to write a separate in-depth article on each of them, a really long one on all of them or a more condensed one without too much detail or workflow explanations, more of an overview. So I recently figured there’s been enough pondering on this subject and I should just start writing something. The very basic common ground for all these mobile video editing apps mentioned here is that they allow you to combine multiple video clips into a timeline and arrange them in a desired order. Some might question the validity of editing video on such a relatively small screen as that of a smartphone (even though screen sizes have increased drastically over the last years). While it’s true that there definitely are limitations and I probably wouldn’t consider editing a feature-length movie that way, there’s also an undeniable fascination about the fact that it’s actually doable and can also be a lot of fun. I would even dare to say that it’s a charming throwback to the days before digital non-linear editing when the process of cutting and splicing actual film strips had a very tactile nature to it. But let’s get started…

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#13 The Xiaomi Mi A1 – A good budget option for mobile videography? — 9. May 2018

#13 The Xiaomi Mi A1 – A good budget option for mobile videography?

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The Xiaomi Mi A1 is Xiaomi’s first “officially” internationally available phone.

Xiaomi has been a really big name in China’s smartphone market for years, promising high-end specs and good build quality for a budget price tag – but only at the end of last year did they officially enter the global scene with the Mi A1. The Mi A1 is basically a revamped Mi 5X running stock Android software instead of Xiaomi’s custom Mi UI. It’s also part of Google’s Android One program which means it runs a ‚clean‘ Google version of Android that gets quicker and more frequent updates directly from Google. For a very budget-friendly 180€ (current online price in Europe) you get a slick looking phone with dual rear cameras, featuring a 2x optical zoom telephoto lens alongside the primary camera. Sounds like an incredible deal? Here are some thoughts about the Mi A1 regarding its use as a tool for media production, specifically video.

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#5 Editing 360° video on Android — 30. March 2017

#5 Editing 360° video on Android

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Cameras that can produce spherical 360 video are becoming more affordable and widespread these days, slowly making their way into the mainstream. The recently released Android-smartphone-specific Insta360 Air clip-on camera has joined a bunch of other entry level 360 cams like the Ricoh Theta S, the LG 360 Cam and Samsung’s Gear 360 to make this new exciting world of immersive visuals available for the crowd while more avantgardistic 360 aficionados are getting their fix with a GoPro-Omni rig or Nokia’s 40000 € Ozo. High-end 360 video solutions are still meant to be post-produced on a desktop machine but the consumer variants are closely tied to mobile devices already. The Insta360 Air connects to the microUSB or USB-C port of an Android phone and records the footage directly to the device. The other three aforementioned entry-level 360 cams can – unlike the Insta360 Air – also be used as a standalone camera without a (physical) connection to the phone but they all have companion apps that will help you to get the best shooting experience and control via a wireless connection. Furthermore, they make it very easy to directly transfer the footage from the camera to the phone for instant sharing or editing. YouTube and Facebook are the two big social networks that already support interactive 360 videos natively, Vimeo has recently added this feature as well. But before sharing, it’s very likely you want to perform some edits on your footage or combine a couple of clips to tell a story. This brings us to the topic of how you can edit 360 video directly on your Android device.

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