+1 for I movies.
The wife uses it to make exceptional short movies of chosen photos with captions music and (within the frame) motion.
They look so professional ( from a layman point of view) and she does a day’s outing in 20 mins to half an hour.
Its usually a 3 min ish type of thing and is so superior compared to handing over a phone and saying ‘swipe right and ignore the crap ones’
I’ve never been an Apple fan but it’s so easy, that I now import my Drone and Gopro footage into it and do my little amateur clips this way too.
Editing is the key. Everyone films everything these days but without careful editing there’s nothing watchable for anyone other than the guy who filmed the shaking mess and his mate. Pretty much as Peter describes.
No disrespect intended but that Auto created video clip is extremely ‘flashy’ for my eyes. The pace that the images change gives me a headache and when TV is the same I have to change channels.
I would not be so sure that “nobody” watches Instagram. My wife has over 12.500 followers on Instagram and gets 85% of her new (fashion related) business from this platform. And they are not all young people. But understood. I think you would have to define your purpose of taking pictures or video and in that light take the best approach to it.
However, I would come back to what I said earlier: “nobody” watches Instagram 
Well, millions do, but in a wholly transient form. Same with a video on Facebook – everything on FB scrolls off your timeline almost immediately. These media are for “instant gratification” by today’s young, mainly. The consequent demands on quality are very different from a video which is made to be watched for a reason.
Clearly it’s now a tricky market to make money out of, even though one classic action cam application – ski movies – are damn hard to do at all well with a phone, and water sports even less so.
I remember Quantel… one of my customers, way back High end video editing clearly still exists.
The market is changing. I used to shoot even with professional Sony cameras, DV tapes (or Betacam) and load this stuff in Avid, later Final Cut Pro X on a Mac Workstation. Now, even the ideal aspect ratio is not what it used to be as for social media such as Instagram, you are making square videos, not landscape for sure. Not that long ago, that was a no-go.
Peter wrote:
All the shops around here which stocked them heavily, with the dedicated display stands and movie players, have almost cleared their stock out and the stands are empty.
Partly due to the new marketing policy of GoPro with a new European distributor demanding unrealistic minimum order quantities.
Peter wrote:
Remember laptops, particularly pricey Sony laptops, 15 years ago? Optimistically, they had 1394 ports for transferring data from DV tape camcorders. Everybody was supposed to get into home movies. Virtually nobody did, because (a) most people don’t know how to shoot (b) you need a much more powerful laptop than the ~2003 winXP ones were (c) the editors have a long learning curve.
It was done right on the Mac. I used my PowerMac G4 (which has a 1394 port) quite a lot for video editing, and the free video editor that came with OSX was actually pretty easy to use and did a good job. None of the Windows video editing software (especially the free stuff that came with firewire cards, which were universally dreadful to use and often had weird skeuomorphic user interfaces) could hold a candle to iMovie.
Point (a) is a good one. Look at how many vertical videos people shoot. All they have to do is rotate their phone 90 degrees to make a proper aspect ratio video, but so many people don’t.
iMovie had a pretty easy learning curve for 99% of tasks you’d want to do with video (insert and edit clip lengths, add audio tracks, change audio track volumes, transitions and titling), but that still doesn’t take away from the fact you often need to shoot an hours video for every 5 minutes of the final product (and you also have to spend probably an hour per 5 minutes of video).
IMHO you should choose the tools for the job and not the job for the tools. I have just ordered 2 go pro 5 hero black cameras for 2 charities (Wildlife SOS and Friendicoes) which I support in India. For many reasons they are the right tools for the job, and would be very difficult if not impossible with other cameras.
Peter you are right about editing fashions. In the early 80’s a magic digital editing system by Quantel entered the market, it was expensive and only purchased by high end video edit companies making commercials.These companies needed to make a good return on their investment so they sold out of hours slots on their machines with editors at a much reduced rate. One of the biggest users of this were the pop video makers and the directors tended to use every editing effect that Quantel could offer, hence early pop videos were packed full of split screens zooming and swooping frames etc. Once the fashion wore off people learnt to use these effects to suit the purpose.
Today’s consumer editing software and hardware are very limited in the type of editing you can achieve, although they can do many things at the push of a button which would have been difficult or time consuming on film or in the early days of video, they do not do the simple things well. For that you need to spend quite a lot of money (for a non professional) although nowhere near the cost of a Quantel.
The point is that I would not even film = record many events in the past as video due to the hassles of taking the camera out of the bag or not having the camera ready. Now, with my iPhone, I have it with me all the time, so many shots and short video clips are there thanks to having the mobile phone ready to take the shot.
I think your video, Aeroplus, illustrates my point It is of course a currently fashionable way of making videos; all the rage these days to cut everything into short sharp fragments, but few will watch it more than once.
And the % of people who make a video to teach someone, or show something to someone, is just too tiny a market.
It is hard to beat a camcorder for video quality, stabilisation, etc (I still have a Canon G40 which does HD at 50/60fps) but that market is even more dead.
On my last trip to Africa, I did not take a DSLR camera with me anymore, but only my iPhone X, 2 Moment add-on lenses (wide angle and telelens) as well as a few action cameras and one 360 degrees camera. I only touched the action cameras once and might not take them along anymore. 95% of the video I shot was with my iPhone X. The rest was done with the 360 video camera. It is so much easier to shoot video with your iPhone. The results are there on your phone instantly and you don’t have to waste time loading videos into editing software, etc.
However, there is one GoPro “thing” that I use all the time and that is their app “Quick” which allows you to make a quick compilation video combining pictures and videos. It takes less than a few minutes to compile and takes away the hassle of editing videos afterwards. I have uploaded to YouTube a sample video created with Quick where I only selected some of the pictures and videos shot from my iPhone and let Quick create the video for me. No editing done.
GoPro Quick Generated video:
