Apple updates Clips for iPhone with Memoji, Animoji, new stickers

Apple's free video creation app Clips has been updated. Following update, users can now easily share personal video messages, slideshows, school projects and mini movies.

Animated stickers and emoji can now follow the movements of a user's face for selfie videos using the front-facing camera on iPhone and iPad. The update also brings new stickers featuring Disney's Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and a new winter-themed poster.

With this update, Memoji created and customized in the Messages app on iOS will automatically appear in Clips. Users can also layer their Animoji and Memoji video clips with filters, animated text, music, stickers and more. The update also allows existing Animoji characters in clips to be changed in a video after it's already recorded.

Animated stickers and emoji can now follow the movements of a user's face when using the front-facing camera on iPhone and iPad. The wider field of view included with the new front-facing camera on iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro also allows users to fit more in the frame when recording selfie videos.

Clips was originally released in 2017. It is a more complex video capture application than the existing capture mechanism in Photos, allowing users to capture a video live, and apply video filters, overlays, and Posters. The Clips app isn't a replacement for more "professional" video editing tools, and is aimed at social media publication, and quick and easy video sharing with existing contacts.

A timeline feature allows for stringing together a sequence of up to 30-minute videos easily, to a maximum of 60 minutes. Posters are basically title pages or video separators, and are full screen text-based images insertable anywhere in the video.

The Live Titles feature records a user's voice, while the app automatically translates it into text in one of 36 languages. Live Titles can have several filters as well, including comic book filters, speech bubbles, shapes and full-screen animated posters.

Smart Suggestions provides the user guidelines on who the app thinks might want to see the video, based on facial recognition data garnered from Photos. Videos made with Clips can be shared directly to popular social networks and video websites, including Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo.

Apple's Clips 2.1 is available as a free update on the App Store and is compatible with iPhone 6s and iPhone SE or later, iPad Air 2 or later and iPod touch (7th generation), running iOS 13 or later and iPadOS 13 or later. New Animoji and Memoji features, along with the Selfie Scenes feature, require iPhone or iPad Pro with TrueDepth camera.