Clips shortcomings. Yes, and…best practices!

In my previous post, I showed an example microlecture video I created using Clips to introduce basic speadsheet functionality to my students. I've since made two more, with the goal (as many of us have) of creating a series. While producing "Average, Sum, and Autofill" and "Chi-square analysis," along with other Clips, I've developed:

• some tips for making a Clips series
• a short list of abilities I wish Clips had (Feature Requests) and
• ways to address some of those (Workarounds)

Clips series

Length: I've found a new use for the acronym KISS (you know: Keep It Simple, Stupid) - Keep It Short & Sweet! I do not always succeed, but Clips isn't built for making long and/or complicated videos (I should know - I'll be posting soon on an 18+ minute Clip I just finished developing over about a week), so you save yourself a world of hurt if you KISS! Your viewers will appreciate videos where you make one concise point with the panache that Clips affords.

Branding: a consistent look and feel will help you produce a professional series. In Clips, this means having common design elements, like employing the same animated icons and posters for similar uses in separate Clips. For example, you might add the thought bubble animated icon every time you ask a question you want students to think about and bring answers to class for. You might use the graph paper Poster every time you have presented students with a new type of equation. I create a "cheat sheet" for myself that shows me which icons and posters I use for different circumstances. The use of the same soundtrack and of the same Live Captions style in all Clips in your series also helps develop a high quality series. Likewise, my best idea is to develop a Clip that you will use at the start of every Clip in your series, and one for the end of every Clip that you produce. Keep these in your Photos library, so that you can easily add them to each Clip you make.

Feature requests

1. It would be great to be able to change font sizes, colors and styles…but we're not there yet. Yes, and…sometimes less is more!
2. I would really like to see the ability to duplicate media components of a Clip (e.g. a Poster) so that it could be reused, after brief editing, more than once in the same Clip without having to re-add the Poster. Likewise, it would be great to be able to move component media between Clips projects.
3. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to apply different soundtracks to different parts of your Clip?
4. Although Clips can Live Caption, it doesn't offer the ability to export a text transcript - which might be nice on occasion
5. It would be great if the components of a Clip (the videos and Posters) could be locked to prevent accidentally reordering them, and/or to be able to group components together or at least to be able to name or label those components. I was, just now, in a distracted moment, making a quick edit to a Clip project, when I accidentally drag-and-dropped one of the components on the timeline. It took me about 15 minutes to figure out which component I had moved and to find the place it had just been in. If I had the ability to group, lock or name (e.g. numerically) all of my component media, then it wouldn't have been as big a problem. Oh, or: Undo would be nice…
6. Did you know: that you have to have a network connection to use Live Captioning? I wonder why that is. I discovered this on a shopping trip. It was one of those situations where my wife went to a store I wasn't particularly interested in, so I brought "homework" (my non-cellular iPad), and discovered I couldn't do my Live Captioning voiceover in my sound studio (aka my car) when parked in the mall parking lot.

Workarounds

1. There isn't one, that I know of.
2. This one has a fairly easy solution - it is only barely less efficient than having this functionality in Clips itself. You create the media component you want to reuse as its own Clip, then share that video file (which exports it to the Photos library), and then you can access that media from any other Clips project. The main drawback is that, as a video file, it cannot be further edited when re-imported into Clips (e.g. you can't change the Live Caption style)
3. You can do this. As above, it involves making Clips that you then import into other Clips. I suspect that, if I asked, the Apple Clips team would tell me that Clips isn't built for advanced video editing, and that I should be using a different product (and they would be correct!)
4. You can copy-paste from the transcript editing window to compile your own text transcript of an entire clip comprising multiple components. It would be tedious. And it wouldn't be time-stamped, which is what some of us expect of a caption transcript.
5. Again, I bet the official response would be: Clips isn't designed for that. And, again, I think they'd be right! If I was making a KISS Clip, I wouldn't have so many components in the first place.
6. Yes, I could have used my iPhone to make a wifi hotspot to connect my iPad to. No, I didn't think of that at the time.

Example

You can see how I applied many of these principles and approaches (KISS and maintaining a consistent style, including using the same intro and outro video in each Clip in a series) in my YouTube playlist of "trailer" videos I produced after the ADE Academy and before this term started. Briefly, this summer I created a course manual e-pub that has one chapter per class meeting. For each chapter, I created what I call a class "trailer" (like a move trailer, giving you a short and hopefully compelling preview of the content of each upcoming class). I require my students to watch each before coming to class, with the goal of stimulating their understanding of the relevance of the course material as well as giving them a question to think about for class. I shamelessly stole this idea from one of the Clips we saw at Academy - I don't remember which of you made it, but it was the Clip about how a tree moves water all the way up its trunk. Thanks - that was obviously inspirational!

Up next on my Clips blog series: a Clip of how to make Clips - describing, in detail, all of the steps in the workflow I used to produce all of the Clips linked above.