StoryCut - Review
November 20, 2020 by RSS Feed
With the popularity of video clips, video editing tools on mobile are not in short supply. Such apps are often swamped with new features, including rich filters, special effects, cute stickers, variable speeds, rough cuts, and even adding recordings. It can often all be a bit much.
In that case, is there a video editing app that is powerful and comprehensive enough to cover all the features provided by existing video editing apps? The answer is – yes, StoryCut is the only video editing app you need on your phone. So if you’re a big fan of clip creation, try StoryCut, which allows you to quickly finish what you want and share it on your desired social media platform.
If you are an amateur, StoryCut also customizes the clip sizes suitable for various social platforms, such as Tik Tok, Instagram, and YouTube - so that you can share the clip with one click after making it. StoryCut has standard editing functions, such as video cut and filters. It’s worth looking at the features in StoryCut that are absent from most editing apps.
PIP
PIP (picture in picture) allows you to merge images with a video. When we tried to overlay an image of a starry sky with my portrait, we saw an incredible double exposure. Using the green screen matting feature, we placed a video in a Jurassic Park scene, and created a Hollywood-style effect.
Keyframe
Keyframe is a dominant feature of StoryCut, a feature previously only available in professional clipping tools on the PC. In this feature, you only need to set a few keyframes to make any material move according to the trajectory you set. For example, if you want the object to move in sync with a moving car, you just need to add two keyframes. This feature can even achieve special effects like those seen in science fiction movies.
Effects
StoryCut offers a vast number of popular effects for short video platforms. Add an old TV frame to the video, or a gold dust effect can give you a dreamlike image. There are also some split-screen effects you can utilise.
Speed
You might think that video speed adjustment is a regular feature - but StoryCut can increase the speed by eight times, with many similar apps only offering half that. We imported a video of some skateboarding and got amazing results after adjusting the speed and combining it with the reverse play function.
Adjust
StoryCut contains 18 fine adjustment parameters, which can make up for the shortage of filters, saving the poorest videos that even filters cannot do anything about. I imported a video taken on a cloudy day with poor lighting, for example, but found that even with a filter, I could not get a nice color. Then I turned on the image quality adjustment. After a series of parameter adjustments, including brightness, sharpness, contrast, saturation enhancement, and color temperature reduction, the video looked brand-new, just like the image quality of a movie, and the clarity was significantly improved.
Very satisfactory results were obtained.
The Good
As detailed above, StoryCut has everything. You can perform every edit imaginable, and the interface is intuitive
enough to allow you to do it in no time at all. It’s entirely conceivable that you could have a video or slideshow with sound effects, cuts, transition, custom audio, double-exposure effects, and picture-in-picture ready in under five minutes.
For the most part, the effects and filters are tasteful and stylish, too, so StoryCut will let you turn out productive, high-quality content at speed. Curious prospective video editors could easily spend hours experimenting with all the tools and functions on offer, some of which are surprisingly advanced.
While tools like Instagram and your phone’s camera software will enable you to apply basic filters and stickers and so on, none of them contains anything like the depth of functionality available in StoryCut. In that sense, the app emphatically earns its place as an advanced, bespoke video tool.
The Bad
StoryCut can recognize voices to generate subtitles. With one tap, you will see subtitles auto-generated from the voices in your clips. For now, this feature is only supported on Android, but we hope the dev team will implement this feature on iOS sooner so users can also enjoy the ease of subtitling that the app provides.
Check out StoryCut via the App Store (and Google Play) and also its official site, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube channels.
Overall
StoryCut is a comprehensive and intuitive video and picture editing app. VIP users will get the most out of it, as long as they don’t mind being subscribers rather than owners, but anyone looking for a richer alternative to Instagram should check it out.
8.3
OVERALL
iPhone Integration 9
Lasting appeal 8.1
User Interface 8
Is engaging 8.2
Does it well 8.3
StoryCut - Video Editor &Maker
Wenzhou XunChi Digital Technology Co., Ltd.
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MovieMusic Review
November 20, 2020 by RSS Feed
Music is a more powerful storytelling tool than most people realize. It’s the vital seasoning that makes every movie, TV show, advertisement, and internet video meme work how it should, manipulating your emotions in exactly the right way.
The problem is, using an existing piece of music involves paying exorbitant fees or drawing on classical pieces that everybody has already heard a trillion times.
MovieMusic aims to solve that problem for you by providing a library of compositions that you can dip into for every conceivable dramatic context.
These tracks, which have been written by a company of jobbing professional composers and performed by a live orchestra, tend to be around a minute long. They fall into 70+ albums, with titles like “Attractive”, “Badness”, “Excitement”, “Light”, “Christmas”, and so on.
The tracks themselves have titles too. In the “Love” album, for instance, you’ll find “Bond”, “Bliss”, “Longing”, “Intimacy”, and more. Each album contains 30 tracks, meaning there are over 2000 in all.
There are a couple of chapters of Orchestral Tools as well - subtle accents to create mood rather than full-blown musical compositions.
The first two tracks in each chapter are free, while the remaining 28 cost 99c a pop. The reason MovieMusic is able to sell its music so cheaply is that the files are restricted to a bitrate of 128kbs, and the tracks are licensed for personal, non-commercial use. So if you’re looking for a cheap way to score your next Hollywood project, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
The Good
MovieMusic is simple to use and it works surprisingly well. The Christmas music sounds Christmassy, the Comedy music sounds suitably quirky and upbeat (think Curb Your Enthusiasm), and the Disgusting music, somehow, sounds disgusting.
A bit of imagination is required when it comes to the individual track names, such as “Baking” (“Bright pizzicato helps show off the intricacies of the expert in full flow”), but on the whole MovieMusic provides snippets of music that intuitively belong in their categories and do what they’re supposed to do.
Every single one of the app’s 2000+ tracks is in the same key and tempo, too, so you can in principle blend them into a seamless orchestral score. It’s very clever.
This really helps when navigating the 2000+ tracks, as does the simple preview - or “audition” - facility that lets you listen to each track in full before deciding whether to spend money on it.
It’s also worth mentioning that each track in MovieMusic has three versions: Cinematic (the default), Intimate, and Modern. While the quality levels of the different versions naturally vary according to the track, in general we find that Cinematic is the one to go for.
MovieMusic has a seamlessly simple interface. You just choose a chapter, pick a song, and tap the play icon to listen. Once you buy and download a song you’re given the option of sharing it via iMessage, WhatsApp, Mail, or even opening it in iMovie or another video-editing program. It couldn’t be easier.
The Bad
While MovieMusic’s interface is intuitive and easy to use, its presentation is functional rather than enjoyable.
You could argue that the same applies to the music itself. This isn’t a criticism of the compositions, all of which sound polished and professional. But the wall-to-wall orchestral arrangements don’t reflect the breadth and variety of music right now.
There’s a bit of digital percussion overlaid on the tracks in Modern mode, but few other nods to contemporary musical styles. If you’re looking for a traditional sound, it’s perfect. Otherwise, you may struggle to find what you’re looking for - even in the Technology chapter.
Overall
MovieMusic is a slightly odd proposition. While asset libraries are usually for commercial use, this one is just for fun.
But it’s a fun tool that will add a pleasing sheen to your personal and non-commercial YouTube videos. It’s incredibly easy to use, too, and it contains a generous supply of musical morsels.
8.4
OVERALL
User Interface 9
Lasting appeal 8.4
iPhone Integration 8.5
Is engaging 8.1
Does it well 8
MovieMusic | Music For Videos
Gothic Projects
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Athenion: Tactical CCG Review
November 20, 2020 by RSS Feed
Athenion might not have the pedigree of some other deck-building card games available for mobile, but that shouldn't put you off. This is a game that's packed full of bright ideas, fresh new gameplay modes and enough content that you can lose hours of your life to.
Battles take place on a 4x4 grid, and see you taking it in turns with your opponent to lay down cards. You draw up to five cards from your deck of forty at the start of every turn.
These are the units you're playing in the fight, and they range from hulking monsters to flighty fairies, from magical trees to fearsome undead dragons.
Your cards have arrows on them that you show you which direction they can attack. You'll also notice a bunch of other numbers on the cards. These let you know the hit points a card has, how powerful its attack is and how many soul points it grants you.
Those soul points let you attack your opponent and they're the key to victory. The first player to lose all of their own hit points is the loser.
There's a lot more going on than that though. For one thing you need to pick from one of six different factions before you even get to the fights.
These factions have different strengths and weaknesses and figuring out which of them best suits the way you want to play is the first step of a pretty long journey.
Different factions have different special moves as well. Some let you link together cards to make them more powerful, others are all about sacrificing weaker units to create pockets of dark magical energy. One lets you build giant rock walls that you can use to protect some of your units or power up others.
There are single-player challenges, regular events and much, much more as well. You're never short of something to do in Athenion, and the pace of the matches lets you get a lot of them in in a single setting.
The Good
There's a staggering amount of depth to Athenion. It's going to take you a good while to get to grips with the basics and once you've done that there are layers and layers to peel back. Every time you win you'll figure out a new strategy and every time you lose you'll be trying to find a way to right that wrong.
The game looks amazing too. The cards all sport a brilliant anime art-style and you'll want to collect all of them just so you can check them out. The speed of the fights is a massive plus too - they deliver huge chunks of tactical action in the sort of short-blast sessions that are perfect for mobile play.
On top of that there's a brilliant community to the game, and you never have to wait long to find an online battle. There are a number of different modes that let you practice with different decks, take part in intriguing events and fight it out in ranked and casual multiplayer matches.
The Bad
There's a pretty steep learning curve here, so if you're not in for the long haul then you might be better finding your card-based fun somewhere else. Even when you've got the basics down you've still got a lot to learn and it can be punishing to come up against an opponent who knows more than you do.
There are also a lot of currencies, crafting materials and other rewards to figure out. The game does tell you what they do, but the tutorials are pretty brief and you're left on your own for a lot of the time to try and get to the bottom of things.
Overall
Athenion might not be the easiest game to understand, but once things start clicking it becomes something really rather special. There are some brilliant ideas here and they're woven into a bright tapestry of gorgeous visuals and wonderfully paced mobile play.
It won't be to everyone's taste, and it's fair to say that some players are going to put it down before they've even got to the good bits, but this is one CCG that it's well worth sticking with.
8.2
OVERALL
Replayability 8.1
Game Controls 8.2
Graphics 8.7
Sound/Music 8.2
Gameplay 7.8
Athenion: Tactical CCG
ZERO-bit Company Limited
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Should You Take Part in the Caravan War?
November 20, 2020 by RSS Feed
Caravan War could easily have been the name of a segment on "Top Gear" in which the presenters destroyed a caravan every week in increasingly ostentatious ways. For better or worse, Caravan War is not a game about destroying caravans. Well, it is. But not that kind of caravan.
Viewing the action from an isometric top-down perspective, you have to fill your little world with buildings - a Headquarters, for conducting trades, a Mill, for producing stuff to trade, an Academy, for training guardians to protect your cargo, a Garage, for storing vehicles, and so on.
Then you have to create more buildings and upgrade the ones you have. To keep the wheels turning you have to trade, which means creating a caravan that can survive a journey through the fantasy badlands, and send out convoys whenever you've got enough cargo to sell.
It also means ambushing the caravans of other players, to steal their gold and cargo. But to pull off an ambush, you need a good number of well-trained bandits and a selection of souped-up towers to place in your enemies' way, in classic tower defense fashion.
And the only way to get an army of well-trained bandits is to upgrade your Tavern and your Bandit Camp and keep earning achievements so that you can get hero cards (and gems.)
Oh, and you should probably complete a few campaign missions to unlock that new tower so that you can nab some extra cargo and make enough money to buy a new weapon for your caravan.
And so on and so on.
Caravan War is an interesting take on the casual strategy genre that's richer and more involved than many of its stablemates.
The Good
Caravan War is a rich and detailed tower defense management game mashup where you're always balancing different priorities to keep your little fantasy empire thriving.
Whereas a lot of free to play strategy games hold your hand to a ridiculous degree, slapping a red sticker on every upgrade or unlock that becomes available so that you never have to use your judgement, Caravan War largely leaves you to do the rounds of your little kingdom alone.
And there's a lot to check. Not only can you upgrade your buildings but you can give promotions to your Guardians and Bandits, and tweak the formation of your caravan, among other things.
Your progress never stalls due to the free to play nature of the game. Even after you've completed the campaign missions, you can avoid an unmanageable confrontation by skipping to the next target caravan every time you send out a scout (for a small fee in gold).
The Bad
While there's nothing particularly wrong with the visuals, the 2D isometric graphics can look a bit dated on a device that's capable of gleaming polygons. The design of the world is generic, and the text is sometimes illegibly small unless you zoom in to read it - even on a large smartphone.
This all takes the shine off an otherwise exciting mashup of tower defense and management, imprisoning a novel concept in the staid uniform of a much more ordinary game.
If you can look past the game's ordinary appearance, you'll find a rich and rewarding free-to-play strategy game underneath - but you shouldn't have to look.
The Verdict
Caravan War is an interesting take on the casual strategy genre that's richer and more involved than many of its stablemates. The gameplay contains enough different threads that you always have something to do, and the difficulty is only ever as challenging as you want it to be.
Unfortunately, a slightly drab appearance detracts from the overall package, and there are more exciting alternatives in the App Store. But if you don't mind putting up with generic visuals, there's plenty to like in Caravan War.
7.6
OVERALL
User Interface 8
Lasting Appeal 8
Does It Well 8
iPhone Integration 7
Is Engaging 7
Caravan War
Hiker Games Joint Stock Company
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Simplify Your Podcast Listening With 'sodes
November 20, 2020 by RSS Feed
'sodes ($2.99) by Nice Boy LLC is a simple and clean podcast app for those who listen to the occasional podcast. With 'sodes, it's more along the lines of Castro 2 instead of other, more fully-featured apps like Overcast. If you only need to listen to a podcast every now and then, rather than every day, then 'sodes could be the app for you.
I love listening to podcasts, but I'll admit it — I've fallen way behind in my podcast subscriptions, and I haven't been able to catch up for the longest time. I must have a subscribed list of around 30 podcasts, and as much as I enjoy listening to them, I'm just overwhelmed with having to catch up so I just stopped listening to most of them. But when I was an avid podcast listener, my app of choice was Overcast specifically for the Smart Speed feature. But with my current non-existent podcast listening habit, I'm not sure Overcast is for me anymore. Fortunately, 'sodes just came out and it could be just what I need.
Castro 2
Supertop Software
Overcast
Overcast Radio, LLC
The design of 'sodes is incredibly minimalistic, and it almost feels like an app that Apple designed themselves due to the aesthetics. On the first launch, you'll be greeted with a simple message that explains how to navigate the app, which is pretty straightforward since there's basically only two screens: Home and Search. The Home screen has a large 'sodes header in the top left, and then you'll have your Favorites, In Progress, and Unplayed Episodes. The Search screen is full of podcast artwork tiles from top podcasts, and there's a search bar in case you don't see what you're looking for.
The default theme in 'sodes is Light, which features a white background and black text. But if you don't care for that, there are additional themes: Dark and Campfire. Dark is more of a steel blue background with light gray text, and Campfire features a burgundy-to-black gradient transition background with blood orange text. No matter which theme you end up sticking with, 'sodes retains the minimalist design and looks great doing so.
Since 'sodes is designed for the occasional podcast listener, don't expect a way to import your previous subscriptions in here. Instead, you'll need to make use of the Search screen in order to find new or current favorites. Just tap on a podcast tile to view details about the show, and view their episode list. You can also add a podcast to your Favorites for quick access. If the show you want isn't featured on the Search view, you can search by name or pasting in a URL.
Once you've picked out a few shows as favorites, you can see them all in the Home screen, as well as Unplayed Episodes. From the Home view, or even from a show's details page, you can tap on an episode and start listening, no subscribing required.
With 'sodes, there are no downloads for episodes. Instead, the app relies 100 percent on streaming the audio, which may raise concerns for those with limited cellular data plans. However, 'sodes intelligently manages data consumption by downloading the audio data in portions. This information is temporarily on the device to help restrict network data usage, but there's no offline playback since a data connection is always required.
During playback, 'sodes has some nice large buttons for play/pause, and rewinding or fast forwarding 15 seconds. You can also tap on the "..." button to adjust the playback speed, select audio output, stop playing, share the episode with others, or go directly to the episode website. The playback bar also displays the elapsed time in a small square that resembles an Apple Watch face, which I thought was a nice detail.
Options for 'sodes is in the iOS Settings, but the gear icon in 'sodes takes you directly to it. You can change the forward and backward intervals, switch themes, and toggle "Keep Screen Unlocked" when the device is connected to power and you're playing an episode.
Listen to podcast episodes when you want to, not when they arrive.
The Good
For the occasional podcast listener, 'sodes is great. The app has a minimal aesthetic design that's simple and straightforward with no fuss. It's easy enough to find the shows you want, or even discover new ones with the featured artwork tiles. Not having to subscribe to get access to episodes is also nice, so this app is perfect when you just want to listen to that one episode of a podcast your friend told you about.
There's also a bit of leeway with the colors, since you have three themes to choose from, and they all look good in their own ways. The large tappable buttons for playback are nice to have as well, especially when driving.
The Bad
If you want a feature-packed podcast app, 'sodes is not the app you're looking for. This app is designed for those who only listen to podcasts every once in a while, and it makes it easier for them to get what they want. If you prefer an app that lets you subscribe, download episodes automatically, create playlists, and more, then you should give Overcast a try.
The only other negative thing about 'sodes is the fact that it needs a data connection to play episodes. For those with unlimited data, this isn't an issue, but not everyone has that luxury. It's nice that 'sodes has smart streaming, but some would still prefer to download an episode before playing it to conserve limited data.
The verdict
So far, I like 'sodes for what it is: a simple podcast app for the casual listener. I doubt that I'll ever be able to manage my huge subscription list in Overcast anymore, so 'sodes is a nice alternative when I just want to find a single episode of something and listen to it when I have the chance to. Plus, as a fan of minimalism, the design is great. I think if there was the option to download episodes for playback, then this would be perfect for the casual listener who doesn't have unlimited data. But if you want a power-user experience, then you should look elsewhere.
You can find 'sodes on the iPhone App Store for $2.99.
8.9
OVERALL
Lasting appeal 9
iPhone Integration 9.5
User Interface 9
Is engaging 9
Does it well 8
’sodes
Nice Boy LLC
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