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Videohance brings real-time video editing to iOS

Far more powerful than Instagram, this amazing app lets you add some serious style to your vids.

Rick Broida Senior Editor
Rick Broida is the author of numerous books and thousands of reviews, features and blog posts. He writes CNET's popular Cheapskate blog and co-hosts Protocol 1: A Travelers Podcast (about the TV show Travelers). He lives in Michigan, where he previously owned two escape rooms (chronicled in the ebook "I Was a Middle-Aged Zombie").
Rick Broida
2 min read

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Videohance offers some really cool tools for tweaking for your video. Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET

If you want to edit video on your iPhone, you have a couple well-known choices. There's iMovie, of course, and Pinnacle Studio, which debuted for iPhone just last month.

Now comes Videohance, a video-editing app with a few cool tricks up its sleeve. For starters, price: It's currently on sale for 99 cents (normally $2.99), versus $4.99 for iMovie and $9.99 for Pinnacle Studio.

Even better, Videohance makes the whole movie-editing process more fun thanks to its real-time tools. It works like this: You shoot a clip (or choose one from the camera roll), then choose one of the five available editing options: Color, Overlays, Frames, Audio, and Edit.

Within each of these you'll find various tools. In Color, for example, you can tap Tune to tweak things like brightness, exposure, and saturation. Or tap Presets and you'll find loads of Instagram-style filters.

What's interesting about this is that while you're browsing these options, your video plays on a continuous preview loop. When you select any modification, it's applied immediately, so you see instantly how it'll look. On my iPhone 5S, at least, this all happens smooth as silk, with no delay, no rendering, no interruption of any kind. (The app requires at least an iPhone 4S, FYI.)

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Videohance can also pan-and-zoom your photos, Ken Burns-style. Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET

And that's the beauty -- and fun -- of Videohance. It's loaded with presets, overlays, frames, and other cool effects, and applying them couldn't be easier. You can add and split clips, and also splice in still photos -- complete with Ken Burns-style photo-motion effects. The end result is a stylized video that would normally require some fairly sophisticated desktop software.

Unsurprisingly, the app does take some time to export your finished product, but it's pretty quick overall. When it's done, you can share/save to a variety of destinations: Camera Roll, e-mail, Facebook, Instagram, text message, Tumbler, WhatsApp, and YouTube. (Curiously, no Twitter.)

For 99 cents, Videohance is a must-have addition to any videographer's app collection. And, let's face it, it's a steal at $2.99, too.