Hidden Gems: Make videos like a pro with Videoshop and SloPro

Hidden Gems: A Week In the Life

A week in the life of Daniel Rubino, powered by Hidden Gems

With support from Microsoft

When it comes to smartphones these days, everyone is an expert photographer. After all, still images are relatively easy to edit and share with all of these one-touch filter apps available. On the other hand, video is a whole other problem. We can all shoot video, but anything beyond uploading to YouTube, or shooting short clips for Vine is beyond most people. It is not because we are incapable, it is just good video editing apps are hard to find.

Today, we are taking a look at two new apps that can make your video posts to Facebook, Vine, or YouTube much more attractive!

Videoshop

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The most difficult aspect of making high-quality videos on a smartphone is the issue of complexity. If you add an abundance of features or make the app non-intuitive it fails you. Make it too basic and it offers nothing unique.

Videoshop is a new app for Windows Phone that was found originally on iOS (but not Android). It has now jumped over to Microsoft, and it finds a nice middle ground for mobile video editing. The app offers numerous abilities all at your fingertips, including:

Edit, merge and reorder multiple videos into one
Add text overlays
Do direct voice-overs
Trim
Add sound (music, themes, sounds)
Tranx (flash black, shrink, grow, etc.)
Copy
Display (variable hue, brightness, contrast, vibrance, saturation)
Resize (crop) and rotate

Videos for editing can be shot directly with Videoshop or imported from the camera roll.

Perhaps the funniest parts are Add sound and Voice-overs. Add sound lets you use your music or the included library of themes and sounds. The themes range from 'War' to 'Horror' to 'News' and adding them to your clips is both entertaining and effective. Voice-overs let you narrate over specific sections, which could be useful for all sorts of situations or humorous in others.

There is also a neat built-in Vine demarcation line. This tool helps you to edit the video down so that it can be shared to Vine.

Videoshop also includes the ability to delete easily or modify previous edits. To do so, you just touch the edits in the timeline to bring up their associated menus. Sounds and music can have their volume controlled independently, letting you have much more creative control.

Of course, it should be cautioned that like all video editing situations, the media and processing power at hand affects performance. Case in point, trying to render a 30-second video at 4K resolution with half a dozen edits takes longer than a 1080p video at just 10 seconds in length. This performance concern also applies to devices with slower processors.

Once your edits are completed, you can then output the file to the 'Style' section. Here you can apply optional Filters and Themes to your video to give it a little extra pizzazz. One of my favorites is 'Runny', which gives your video that 'film running through a projector' look to it. In this area, you can also add Title, Author, Place and the Date to appear at the beginning.

Finally, when your video is all set you can hit the Share button to send it off to Vine, YouTube, Email, or Photos (camera roll).

Overall, Videoshop is a well-done app with many more features on the way such as video-reverse, photo slideshow and stop motion. The developers behind Videoshop have been good about delivering bug fixing updates, and we should continue to see significant support for this app for some time.

Hit record!

Tweet at us how you're using SloPro and Videoshop for your video recording and include the #HiddenGemsApp hashtag!

Tweet your #HiddenGemsApp video use

SloPro

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Ever recorded something amazing with your Windows Phone's video camera? Now you can pick that critical moment and slow things down with SloPro. This small app has one purpose: alter the speed of your videos.

What makes SloPro interesting is this is not an 'all or nothing' approach to video speed. You can take just a small portion of a video and slow it down (or speed it up, as this can do both). You likely have seen this effect in movies or TV commercials where everything is moving very fast only to super-slow down to catch that important instant where something amazing happens.

SloPro offers you the ability to slow down videos so that they are just 50, 40 or 25 percent the speed of the original. Alternatively, you can speed them up so that they 1.3x, 2x or speedy 4x the speed. Needless to say, if you have a few moments, this can be very fun to play with on your phone.

Videos for editing can be shot directly with SloPro or imported from the camera roll. For now, I'd stick to using your native video camera app as the SloPro one lacks fine-grained tools at this stage in its release.

SloPro also can trim the video's start and end times, in case you want to take an extended video and just show the crucial scene of interest.

Finally, when you are done with your edits, you can hit the save edits button. Once that is done, just arrow back to the previous menu, and it is here you can Edit, Play, Share, or Delete. The Share option outputs to YouTube or the universal Share picker in Windows Phone.

Go Pro with SloPro

SloPro is free to use, on the other hand if you want to remove the watermark or save directly to your Camera Roll you need to fork over $3.99 through an in-app purchase. That is not cheap. However, the app does seem to work quite well, and if you think you will use this a lot, then it is something to consider. We happen to like it a lot.

Document all the things!

Hopefully, you find one or both of these apps useful. Neither are highly publicized as recently joining the Windows Phone ecosystem, so we think they are worth the coverage. They fill an important niche in mobile imaging, and we believe many of you will find them handy when you are shooting with your Windows Phone.

Day 4 sweepstakes:Win a GoPro Hero3 White!

Enter to win 1 of 4 GoPro Hero3 White action cameras!

It's video day of Hidden Gems, so we're giving away four — FOUR! — GoPro Hero3 White action cameras worth $200 each!

How to Enter: To enter this Hidden Gems sweepstakes for your chance to win a GoPro Hero3 White action camera, simply login to Windows Central and leave a meaningful comment to this article (if you leave multiple comments only your first will be counted towards the sweepstakes entry). If you don't have an account you can register now for free – it only takes a minute.

The sweepstakes run through the end of June and the winners will be announced in early July. Full Hidden Gems Sweepstakes Rules can be found here. Thanks for participating, and good luck!