Velapp has made it easy to edit live video while you shoot it — in recognition of the fact that sometimes being fast matters more than making it look perfect.
Using the 3D Touch on the iPhone 7, you can press on your screen while recording a live video. The harder you press, the higher the rating. You can assign a rating anywhere from zero to 10 as you record. Velapp will automatically edit the best part of the video for you without your having to do anything. You can then turn a 10-minute video into something like a two-minute highlight reel.
“This is a new way to capture film,” said David De Min, CEO and founder of Velapp, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Everyone has pain points when it comes to video editing.”
And now the company is launching new features that make editing on-the-fly video even easier. Velapp is announcing several more features — coming in the next update — that will make Velapp even more useful.
Now your videos will no longer be limited to a single source video. You will be able to shoot video all day, then piece together the best moments from separate videos. This will save you a lot of time otherwise spent going through each video one by one and stitching them together with another video.
You can also do live transitions. There are times when editing calls for a fade to black or a wipe between two scenes. Velapp is developing a way to allow you to insert live transitions.
Velapp will also create an Android version. With high demand for Velapp’s ease of use and technology on every mobile device, the company is now planning to create Velapp for Android for sometime later this year.
The company also said it is working on next-generation artificial intelligence-based editing tools that will remove editing and still make your video look like it was done by a pro.
De Min has a film background, and he said he got the idea while on a trip to India with his brother. They took a couple of GoPros while on a fly fishing trip and captured 325 hours of footage. It took De Min three weeks to edit it.
“I was pulling my hair out,” he said. “The idea came to me like a light bulb.”
He figured that if you could make use of the 3D touch pressure sensor for the new iPhone, you could constantly rate the film as you shoot it, without interrupting the filming process.
He said, “Most people don’t have time to edit. With this, you can have 25 minutes of video and instantly reduce it to three minutes, and it automatically edits the boring parts out.”
For phones that don’t have 3D touch, you can simply use your finger to move an on-screen slider to rate the video as it is being recorded.
The company has four employees and is now starting to raise money. De Min showed the app to Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, and he praised it.
The app is free, but you can pay $3 via in-app purchase to remove a watermark on the video. Over time, Velapp hopes to integrate the rating system into video cameras. De Min started the company in early 2016.