Following on from yesterday’s story / tutorial, it is timely to now discuss what you can do with those freshly minted brilliant photos and videos you have created with your new-found skills.
Luckily, GoPro has come to the rescue in the last week and updated its original GoPro app for smartphones. Complete with a new name, Quik (I wonder if their research picked up this was also a chocolate drink that, to me, is quite foul), it is also camera and OS agnostic, working with any camera or smartphone footage / imagery using iOS and Android.
In its base form, it is also free with access to basic editing tools; if you want to shell out the AUD$14.99 per annum or AUD$2.99 per month you also get unlimited use of all the clever bits including unlimited Mural Events, edits, edit themes, scene-optimised filters, access to royalty-free tracks and use of the new speed tool.
If you own GoPro cameras, of course Quik can also be used to control those cameras just as the previous app did.
In Use
The heart of Quik is called the Mural. This is an area that using AI, gets all your photos and videos from wherever they are stored on your phone and edits them automatically into a video that is beat set to music.
Additionally, you get tools to manually edit, some filters, themes and music to play around with and customise the Mural to your personal taste.
The drawback in the way Quik works at present is that as its primary function is as a content maker, using the AI to create a video, it is not exactly a storage solution as yet. GoPro says that will come later when the facility to save every photo and video in its original format to the cloud is added to the app.
Mural can be viewed two different ways – a swipe down gallery or as thumbnails, and you can easily switch between the two views using a familiar pinch-to-zoom gesture.
Initially, you create a blank video and then select the photos and videos that will go into making the content, so you do still have to manually choose your content.
One nice feature very useful for sporting videos especially is a multi-speed option letting you adjust the playback speed of a clip at any in point and then setting an out point to change speed back to default or any different speed.
A completed Mural video when using the AI is no Spielberg production. It does what is says on the tin in effect, with basic transitions and cropping that sometimes is not as good as it should be. However, you can dive in manually to re-order clips add new clips and delete those you don’t want in the finished product as well as trimming, cropping, filtering, adding text overlay and adjusting such things as exposure, contrast, vibrance and colour.
I found you can also pull still images from video clips.
Once you are happy with the final result, you can export the completed video directly from your smartphone to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube or alternatively, create a share link.
As mentioned, Quik is also a replacement for the original GoPro app for controlling GoPro cameras, and I found with my GoPro Hero 8 and 9 Blacks no issue switching to Quik for this purpose. My GoPro MAX also performed to expectation under Quik. To access the camera controller portion of Quik, its simply a tap away using an icon in the top right hand corner of the app’s main page.
Conclusion
If you want to do some serious editing of your videos and require a full blooded program but one that is still free, I’d recommend downloading the free Blackmagic Da Vinci Resolve video editing program (NLE). This is available for Mac OS, Windows and even LINUX.
If this is too daunting – and there is quite a learning curve although you could just stay in the Cut page section of Resolve if you want “Quick and Dirty”, then have a look at HitFilm Xpress from fxHome which combines an editor and compositing package into a free and easy to use Windows based app.
Adobe also has its own solution I the form of Rush, so there are plenty of options. If you are a dedicated GoPro user though, Quik is certainly attractive as it also gives you the camera control facility.
If you simply use your smartphone for basic videos and photography, Quik, whilst relatively basic, is a nice easy option to create content quickly and get it to social media, without the learning curve more sophisticated apps demand.
You can download GoPro Quik from the App Store and Google Play depending on your device’s operating system.