Why Im making a video editing app
In August 2015, while travelling in Japan and thinking about my next app project, I decided I wanted to take on a big challenge. I wanted to work on a big project on top of my job. This had to be a challenging and interesting app, to keep me from getting bored or feeling like I would not accomplish or learn anything once the app was finished. From personal experience, when working on simple apps, you quickly loose interest because the app is not challenging enough, the design is not great, or something new and shinny catches your attention. I did not want this to happen with my next app.
The first thing that contributed to my decision of making a video editing app, was the fact that the iPhone 6s was going to be able to shoot 4K video. This was a big thing. And so I thought, with a 4K video camera on your phone, you could make some pretty high quality videos, but you would need to do all the editing on a computer, and if you are sharing to Facebook or Youtube, you would definitely want to do this on a computer!, or at least on WIFI. This lead me to a constant search of video editing apps over the next few weeks,
At the time I was amazed at how many image editing apps exist in Appstore, the list is endless under the photography category, and a lot of these apps are actually pretty good. From the pleasing design, and powerful functionality, such as masking images with text and changing color tones, to the simple apps that let you add Instagram like filters. I tried to find an equivalent of a photography app but in the video category, and I noticed there was an absence of high quality video editing apps. After downloading over 20 different video editing apps and comparing them to one another, I quickly ruled out the ones that were based on a social network, or the ones that had a cloud service behind them to do the editing for you. From the ones I was left with, I found some of them to be decent, but most of them were just okay. From the good ones like Cameo, Clips, VideoShop and iMovie I took some inspiration and ideas. From the other ones I took notes on what needed to be fixed or improved. Surprisingly, I did not find an app that I was happy with in terms of design and UX, nor did I find one that had all the functionality that I expected.
From a decent video editing app, I would expect some basic functionality, such as putting multiple videos together, trimming videos, adding text and adding audio, and this should all be pretty easy to accomplish. After countless searches and downloads in the Appstore, I found no app that would do all these things the way I wanted, or the way they promised. Yes, some of them do stand out, but I discovered that this was not a saturated market, at least not yet, and for me this was an opportunity. So I decided to venture myself into making a video editing app for my next big app project.
So far it has been 6 months since I started the development, and I can say that it has definitely been a challenge, with a very steep learning curve. Why is video editing a challenge? Well, this is a topic for another post, but to put it simply, video editing is just difficult to work with in terms of programming. And not only the code is difficult, but the all interface elements that need to work well together, so that users can make sense of it all, and make video editing easy.
Im proud to say that the app is almost there, maybe one month away. This post is not to say that I am making the best video editing app ever made, but I hope it will become a popular and useful tool for people to edit videos on the go, with all the simple functionality that I expect from a good video editing app.
