This convenient app lets you shoot
and share your videos – not just on YouTube, but on major social networks as
well.
Many shoot-and-share-video options are
available via the Apple App Store. But none of them had YouTube in its name
until now. Google, the parent of YouTube, which is practically synonymous with
home-made video, has released YouTube Capture (go.macworld.com/capture), a free
app for shooting and sharing video on your iPhone or iPod touch.
Getting started with Capture is no-sweat
simple. Download the app, sign into your Gmail account, and connect your
account with your YouTube channel.
YouTube
Capture For iOS
Preferences and settings
At the Get Started screen, you can begin
swiping your way through preferences such as ‘Enhance Automatically’ and
‘Stabilize’. You can choose to see all of your existing videos through the app
by enabling step lets you define where else you want to share your videos the
options include Google+, Facebook, and Twitter besides YouTube, where the video
will post by default. You can upload your video simultaneously to all of the
sites you check during setup.
Settings under the Gear icon let you choose
whether to have the landscape lock on or off, and whether to rotate the device
as a signal to begin recording.
The upper left corner of the app’s
interface allows you to decide whether to illuminate the scene by turning on
the iPhone’s light, and whether to use its rear or front-facing camera.
The red Record button is hard to miss –
it’s mighty and bold.
YouTube
Capture’s simple, cursive instructions guide you each step of the way
Editing
YouTube Capture offers very little in the
way of editing options. But you can use the Enhance button for general video
corrections. If you chose color correction and image stabilization in the
settings, the app will also do those fixes for you. And you can trim the video
with Trim sliders.
The Trim feature in YouTube Capture is
nondestructive – it will not actually cut your video to the trimmed size, but
only upload the portion of the video that you didn’t trim. That means you can
export the entire video to another editor, and have a record of your shoot in
its entirely.
To let you sound a little more polished,
Google includes YouTube Soundtracks that you can attach, spanning moods such as
Ambient, Blues, Classical, Electronic, Folk, Melancholic, Happy, and more.
There’s only one musical selection for each category, however, and no option to
use your own music for the soundtrack.
YouTube Capture includes some basic privacy
features. The info and settings pane lets you specify whether you want the
video to be public, unlisted (with access by link only), or private.
When you finish recording, tap the Upload
button. Tap the top to review your video, the app then prompts you to enter a
title for the piece.
The Location Sharing button will record
your current location, if you wish. You can add keyword tags to your video,
assign it a category, and attach a Standard or Creative Commons license to your
movie.
Once you click the Upload button, the video
will start uploading to your YouTube channel. A video of 17 seconds’ duration
took less than a minute to upload. A 30-second video, shot and uploaded under
suboptimal conditions in a subway, was produced in under 5 minutes.
The
Trim feature in YouTube Capture is nondestructive – it will not actually cut
your video to the trimmed size, but only upload the portion of the video that
you didn’t trim
Minor issues
Though recording a short video was easy, quick,
and satisfying, I did run into a few difficulties in my testing of the app.
Apart from one problem that has since been fixed, however, they were all minor.
It seems to take the YouTube site some time
to process all of the components of a video, as I discovered when, after
creating and uploading one, I decided to go back and add a soundtrack.
Initially the soundtrack wouldn’t play, but a few minutes later it did.
Another limitation is that YouTube Capture
restricts the display resolutions of uploaded videos to 480p and 720p.
YouTube Capture is optimized for the iPhone
5 and runs on devices with iOS 5 or later. It’s compatible with iPhone 3GS and
later, as well as with the iPod touch, but it isn’t available for the iPad.
