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YouTube launches Capture, a video recording and enhancing app for iOS

YouTube launches Capture, a video recording and enhancing app for iOS

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YouTube Capture
YouTube Capture

YouTube has just launched Capture, a new app for iOS. It lets users take quick video, make minor adjustments, and upload that video to YouTube, Google+, Facebook, or Twitter. The app is built specifically for iPhone and iPod touch and is available in the App Store now. Google says that the app was built specifically with speed and convenience in mind — it's ready to shoot video as soon as you open it — and also noted that users can shoot and upload a video in as few as three taps.

Looks like YouTube wants the "Instagram of video" title

Once opening Capture, users can shoot new video or use existing footage from their camera roll; from there they can apply some automatic color correction filters, trim the video, and even apply a soundtrack. The app automatically starts uploading video as soon as you're done shooting, and it also helpfully includes a landscape lock reminder to help cut down the blight of vertically-shot videos that are being taken these days. In addition to the default YouTube sharing, Capture also offers optional sharing across the major social platforms — it appears to provide an exceptionally easy way to share video automatically to both Twitter and Facebook. Users are also able to tag videos with their location, but that can be turned off for a whole account or on a per-video basis. On the downside, it looks like the app is limited to 720p uploads, probably in an effort to increase upload speed.

Capture looks to be just the latest in an ever-growing line of quality iOS apps. After several years where Google only released fairly sub-par offerings, there are now excellent apps for nearly all of Google's service available on iOS — and this app surprisingly made it to iOS before Android. While Android makes sharing these types of videos a bit easier than iOS, it's still interesting to see the amount of attention Google is lavishing on Apple's platform this year. While new video-sharing apps like Socialcam and Viddy are vying for the title of "the Instagram of video," Google might have just outdid them all with this new app that's so tightly integrated into the YouTube behemoth.