After messing around with the amazing Hyperspektiv app earlier this week, I thought it would be a great way to make music videos. Hyperspektiv glitches your videos and Live Photos, giving them incredible special effects. All you need to do is arrange the resulting clips, and add music.
You can do this in any video-editing app on your iPhone or iPad — iMovie for instance. But that requires lot of manual work to get the music synced up with the video clips. After a little searching, I found Quik, a video app from GoPro. It’s not ideal — it likes to upload your videos to its servers with little warning — but it also has one essential feature: Quik analyses any music you add, and automatically syncs the video clips to the beat.
Quik is quick
Quik really is quick. Open it up, tap the + button to start a new project, and you’re immediately in your photo library. This is where you pick the clips you want to use — still images and videos both work. You can browser all your albums, including the built-in smart albums that collect your animations, videos, and Live Photos.
Photo: Cult of Mac
Add as many as you like. Pick lots of short clips. I mostly used the little clips I made in Hyperspektiv.
Then tap Add, and your video will begin. The main view shows the various styles available. Tap to preview them. And be prepared to pause things a lot. Quik insists on playing the video, music and all, whenever you change anything. To pause, tap the main video and use the little pause button.
You can edit some basic aspects of these styles, including the title font, and color scheme
Add some music
Once you have a style you like, tap the music note button in the bottom toolbar. Then tap My Music, if you want to add your own. The app can only see music that you have purchased from the iTunes Store, so you can’t use anything from your Apple Music library, or even songs you have added yourself.
Fortunate, you can load tracks from places like Dropbox, or from iCloud Drive. Tap the big + to access the Files app and find your song. Quik will analyze it for beats, then you can watch the preview. See how the cuts sync with the music!
Edit and add more clips
Tap the central icon, the one that looks like one photo laid on top of another. You’ll see all your clips lined up in a timeline. Drag to reorder them, and double-tap on a clip to edit it. If the clip has its own audio, you can mute it here. You can also delete the clip, and edit many other parameters. You may also want to duplicate clips to use them multiple times in the same video.
This is also where you add more clips, if you need to. Tap the icon on either side of the clip to reopen the photo library picker. Tap OK when you’re done.
You can also drag the thumbnails in the timeline to re-order them, and you can double-tap the title card to edit the text. You can also disable the title entirely, in the same way as you switch off the annoying Quik outro:
Remove the Quik outro from the end
The app adds an outro with the Quik logo, which is totally uncool. Tap the thumbnail of this outro in the timeline, and tap Disable.
Save and share
Tapping Save lets you save the video to your Photo Library. Tapping any of the other options will upload your video to Quim’s servers, and create a link for you to share, so don’t do that until you’re ready.
Instead, tap the X button at the top left. This lets you save the project locally, although it also appears to upload it as a draft.
The general gist is that you should just assume that Quik will upload everything that you add to it. If you’re planning to export the video to use on YouTube or Instagram, then that’s probably fine. After all, no company is likely to have a worse privacy policy that Google or FaceBook.
If you have any other cool tips for making beat-synced music videos from your clips, please let me know. Quik is nice,easy, and gives great results, but it’s also quite annoying to use.
Quik – GoPro Video Editor
Price: Free
Download: Quik – GoPro Video Editor from the App Store (iOS)
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