Why You Can Trust CNET Tastemade review: A fun way to make video reviews of your favorite hot spots
An app that's taken awhile to gain traction is finally hitting its stride, letting you make short video segments about the places and restaurants you love.
Tastemade (iOS|Android) is a fun app that gives you a step-by-step process for making professional-looking food or location videos. The videos are only a minute long, but they give you a great platform to sing the praises of your favorite restaurants and hot spots.
Tastemade
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Tastemade isn't just about making video reviews; it's also about finding new spots from other users. Since the app has been available on both iOS and Android for some time, it has a large catalog of reviews to explore.
With that said, though it's certainly grown since its launch on the app stores, there are still a lot of cities that have no reviews. Hopefully, once people get a taste for how easy it is to create quick videos of their favorite spots, it will likely to grow even more.
Getting started
The best way to get started with Tastemade is to browse videos made by other people. Watching a few videos will give you a sense of the pacing and help you come up with ideas for good shots. You'll quickly see that some people have a flair for being on camera, but even when they don't, the app's step-by-step process manages to make just about anyone look good.
Once you've seen the videos you can make with Tastemade, you'll be ready to dive in and make your own.
You start by entering the name of the location or restaurant, then pick from several different themes that include different fonts and background music choices. For example, you might choose a lively guitar-strumming backdrop for your trip to a favorite burger place, or a more electronic drum-and-bass theme for a dimly lit dance club. Part of what makes a good Tastemade video is picking the right theme for the place.
Shooting your video clips
Tastemade maps out your video by telling you what to do each step of the way.
After the title and theme, you'll need to shoot a 10-second video where you introduce the location, followed by five shorter clips that show the restaurant's ambiance and style. At that point, you return to the screen for 15 seconds to talk more about the dishes you got, then shoot an additional five clips of you and your friends enjoying the food. Finally, a quick 10-second video (the outro) wraps up your Tastemade video.
What's cool about Tastemade is you don't have to worry too much about making a mistake, because you can always delete the last scene and shoot it again if you need another take.
One thing I noticed is that during the five quicker short clips, if you delete one in the middle and shoot another clip, it gets tacked on to the end rather than replacing your old clip. Fortunately, you can resequence the clips any way you want by tapping and holding a clip, then moving it to the desired location.
Using the app to explore
At this time, most people make food-focused videos, so what you find in the various feeds is almost always a restaurant video. You can sort videos by Staff Picks (hand selected by Tastemade), Popular, or Near Me. So Tastemade also acts as a way to find good food around you, much in the way 0f Foursquare or AroundMe. But Tastemade is arguably better because you get a better feel for the restaurant with live shots of the action.
While most of the videos from Tastemade users are about food and restaurants, there's no reason you couldn't also make it about a destination. For example, you could use it to show a visit to the Golden Gate bridge, video the sights and give tips while you talk about it during the audio segments.
Tastemade saved all the clips?
One problem I had with the app was something I realized only when I went into my photo library later; Tastemade saves every one of the video clips to your photo library by default. This means everything you shot from the intros and outros, to each and every one of the shorter clips are saved as video files that quickly fill up your library. Alone, these separate clips are mostly useless and you'll want to delete them, but the biggest problem is that the app doesn't let you save the finished product. This means you'll only be able to view the video in the app itself, and any sharing you do with Twitter or Facebook will only provide a link to the video.
Fortunately, if you go to the app settings, you can turn off "Record to Camera Roll" to stop saving each clip of the video, but it would be much better if it never saved the various clips and saved the finished product instead.
Conclusion
Tastemade is a refreshingly fun and unique app that's great for talking about your favorite spots while finding new ones from other users. The process is laid out for you so you only need to fill in the blanks, and the clips and background music flow seamlessly throughout your video for a really nice result.
I don't like how the app will happily save every video clip taken to my photo library, but won't give me the complete result. I'm sure it's to get people to go to the app to view videos, but I think it's an unnecessary hurdle.
Still, even with its issues, Tastemade is a cool idea that's great if you love food and don't mind a little screen time. It's easy to use and produces surprisingly good-looking results.