Review: VEE FOR VIDEO is a Very Good App for Creating Great Everyday Video

Part II | Click here to read Part I of this review

Shooting Video with Vee

Shooting with Vee is fast and responsive. In camera mode, Vee is always ready to shoot. Even on my older device, I never encountered any delays or other latency while the app “caught up”. It does a lot of its magic in the background. Clips go right into a timeline at the bottom of your viewfinder. This also serves as your editing timeline.

Although you can’t change filters or other settings while shooting video, you can tap and drag to change your focus and exposure targets while shooting, making for interesting depth of field and other in-camera effects.

One very, very nice feature is that Vee will not let you shoot video in portrait mode. We naturally see in landscape mode. We see real life in a wide field of view. The expectation is that movies are to be seen wide and not tall and Vee shows a friendly reminder to rotate your device if you try to shoot video in portrait mode. Thank you, Vee.

Editing with Vee

Vee stores your clips in movies. Each clip is stored intact within each movie. You can also import clips from your iPhone’s camera roll as well as copy and paste clips between movies in your projects. Finished videos can be exported to your camera roll.

Editing a movie – resequencing the scenes, trimming the excess fluff out of each scene, etc. – makes your videos tighter and more interesting to watch. Editing video natively on iPhone is often slow, cumbersome, and not fun.

Editing video in Vee is fast and it’s drag and drop easy – simply tap and hold a clip to move and rearrange. To trim frames off either end of a clip, simply drag the handles of the clip in and out. Even after extensive editing, no footage is lost until you delete the video or clip from your device and you can always go back and restore footage that was trimmed from a clip.

There’s no tool to split a clip. The workaround is easy, but clunky. You tap to select the clip, duplicate, trim, and move. It’s a few extra steps. Editing video is so fast and easy in Vee, this was nowhere near a deal-breaker for me.

Vee comes with several filters to brighten, saturate, and cool your clips. There are a few other filter sets available as an in-app purchase for $0.99 each. Rather than apply retro film effects and textures to your video, Vee’s filters are more color graders and apply tone and color enhancements. It’s more subtle than an effects app but it gives your videos a more polished look. Filters can easily be applied and changed for each clip. I found no way to easily apply a filter to the entire movie. It’ll painstakingly need to be applied clip by clip. That’s quite a pain for a long, well-edited movie that you want to convert to black & white.

I wish all apps were as responsive as Vee in editing mode. Even with my large fingers and a small screen, I never had a problem selecting and moving clips around in the Vee timeline. The tools and interface are designed for a large number of users.

Sharing Your Movies

Like a good photo app, Vee shares to a number of services in-app. Taking advantage of the hooks in iOS, Vee natively shares to Apple services, YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Dropbox and others. Native Instagram, Twitter and Vine support are conspicuously missing here. Both services only support short video clips and that may be part of the reason. However, excluding these popular networks from a consumer-oriented video app like this – no matter what the reason – is a big omission.

Vee can export your movie in the background an notify you when it’s complete. This is a great feature that gives control of your device back to you a lot faster than if you had to keep the app in the front and wait for it. I found, though, that while it was uploading, Vee wanted to take all of my bandwidth. Even trying to browse the web on my iPhone became slow and unreliable until my video was uploaded.

The Bottom Line

Vee wants to be Camera+ for video and this first release comes close. For everyday video, Vee is an excellent app to help you easily create and share more interesting videos and will be my go-to video app for shooting “stuff.”

As good as it is, I think Vee is incomplete, even for a consumer video app. Most notably, Vee doesn’t make title cards in-app. There’s no way to add titles and credits to your finished movie. Even a basic “Our Summer Vacation” title card at the beginning of a movie is pretty much standard. There’s only one style of transition from clip to clip. There are no crossfades, fade-ins or fade-outs. For editing, being able to drop some sort of marker in the timeline would be very helpful.

The soundtrack only lets you add and mix one song from your iTunes library as a music bed or background. While I can see how it might really bloat up the app, having the ability to import several songs from iTunes would be better for matching the music to the images.

For and app that has almost all the tools for stop-motion animation, the omission of a single frame mode is a glaring omission. And for an app that wants to do for iPhone video what Camera+ did for photos, which is a shoot-app-share workflow, support for Twitter, Vine, and Instagram video is essential.

This may sound like a huge list of complaints I have with the app. In fact, most of these are a wish list. There’s room for improvement here, but this is also a version 1.0 release.

I’m very happy with Vee and definitely recommend it. It’s a powerful and very reasonably-priced video app. With its easy-to-use tools, its well thought out interface in which to use them, and the speed and stability of the app itself, Vee takes the drudgery out of editing video on the iPhone and makes it fun to create tiny everyday masterpieces on the go.

Download Vee For Video

App Store link: Vee for Video – Medious

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