If you’re as addicted to ‘toy camera’ apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram as I am then you’re going to love Viddy. It’s a great looking video sharing app that allows you to apply creative effects to video clips and share them in a stream.
Sharing tweaked photos in a social stream is all the rage right now in mobile devices, you’ve got Instagram of course, recently hot new startup Color and some eerily similar clones in the overseas App Stores. That’s why it’s so surprising to me that it took this long for an app like Viddy to do the same with video clips.
The process for sharing a video with Viddy is very similar to most of those photo sharing apps. You shoot a short video clip, or choose one from your library, you add an effect to it and choose the intensity of the effect and you post it to your feed with a description, location and tags. The effects range from a simple black and white to a grungy Junked look and even a 3D filter if you happen to have some glasses laying around.
In an interesting touch, each effect actually has a sound track that accompanies it and you choose the mixture between the music and the microphones recorded soundtrack as you post it. The processing is done in the background on your phone itself after which it’s posted to your stream and saved in your library. From what I can tell the videos are downsized fairly significantly to make them faster to process and post but so are most Instagram photos and as the clips are primarily for online sharing that’s not a dealbreaker for me. Viddy also allows you to cross-post your video to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube now with Foursquare and Tumblr sharing forthcoming.
It’s not surprising to me that Viddy looks so similar to Instagram as the layout has become a popular one with a lot of sharing apps, although I could see some folks crying foul at exactly how similar it does look. Regardless, Viddy does seem to work very smoothly and the initial effects are well done. I’ll be interested to see whether sharing filtered video clips will prove to be just as popular as doctored photos.
Viddy for iPhone is free, grab it here to try it for yourself.
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