Leasowe Castle & Lighthouse ― The Quik Edits

As threatened last week, I have now sent the Leasowe Castle & Lighthouse videos through Quik, and the results can be seen below.

Leasowe Castle Quik version

Leasowe Lighthouse Quik version

The initial results were not that great.  I had to go back into iMovie and do a lot of pre-editing to make sure that Quik was actually concentrating on the actual subjects of each video, i.e. the castle and the lighthouse.  There can be no doubt that we have not yet reached the point where Quik’s AI understands the context of the video.  Instead, it clearly focusses on parts of the video that show rapid change, presumably because they are likely to be more visually stimulating, and Quik was clearly written for GoPro cameras and athletes trying to achieve death-defying stunts.

That is all fair and square, but for that reason I do not understand why GoPro does not allow more human interaction during the editing process.  Surely, it is not all that technically challenging to allow users to ‘highlight’ one way or another what they think are the key moments of the video, and for Quik to then work around that…?

However, once I had edited the videos to the point where Quik had no choice but to show the parts that I wanted shown, I am very impressed with the result.  Grudgingly, I have to admit that I think the final Quik edit is actually better than my edits.  Part of that is of course that Quik is absolutely ruthless in cutting away anything not crucial to the movie, while I of course will always have the tendency to show all the footage I have taken.

I was contemplating to put a poll here to see what other people think about which is the better version of each video, but I think I know the outcome, and I will not like it, so decided to do away with it…

On a marginally related note, there were also quite a few technical difficulties to import the movies into Quik, which I will explain below for those with a wish to experiment with it themselves…

Quik was born when GoPro bought a software called Splice, and is available for free from the GoPro homepage.  The main point of Splice and consequently Quik is to always make sure that the cuts in the video coincide with the beat of the music.

It is certainly quite generous of GoPro to offer Quik for free, and so I do not want to complain too loudly, but one of the most annoying features of Quik ― beyond the fact that it is fully automatic and does not allow for any human input into the final result ―is that GoPro has gone to some extreme length to make sure that Quik cannot be used with any footage other than that taken by a GoPro camera.

I understand that GoPro has put a large amount of money into buying Splice, and then a rather large effort into developing it into Quik.  GoPros objective is therefore clearly for Quik to become a selling point for GoPro cameras, and therefore wants to make it as hard as possible for anyone to use Quik to edit any videos taken by cheap Chinese copies of its cameras.

However, as always the people suffering are the ones with a legitimate claim to using Quik, who would like to enhance their videos by combining them with footage other than the one taken by the GoPro camera.  I remember a company that was once synonymous with computing ― Commodore ― having the same illusion that customer loyalty can be forced by making their hardware incompatible with everyone else, while IBM went the exact opposite way and made their architecture as open as possible.  We all know how that battle ended…

I do own a GoPro Hero 4, and am a legitimate and registered user of Quik.  GoPro does not legally prohibit users from using Quik with footage from other cameras ― so I am not in breach of the terms of my licence ― they have just done their best to make it as hard as possible.  Here is how I overcame the restrictions:

This hack is based on the fact that the iPad version of Quik is not even remotely as good at recognising the original source of any video footage than the desktop version of Quik.  The trick is therefore to get the footage onto the iPad, process it there, then re-import it onto the MacBook:

1. Edit the video with iMovie.  Remove all sound, and cut out all wastage.  Make sure that all clips are in the order you want.
2. Export the iMovie project to a file.
3. Compress the file, e.g. into an MP4.  Ideally, you do not want the file size to be much beyond 200 MB.  Annoyingly, this is not a restriction of Quik, but of MacOS Airdrop.
4. Import the file into MacOS Photos.
5. Switch off the Firewall. 
6. Airdrop the video directly into iOS Photos.
7. In Quik on the iPad, tab on the Plus symbol to add a new project, select iOS Photos as the import source, change the import options at the top from Photos to Videos, and select the file you just imported into iOS Photos.
8. Start editing the file in Quik.  Particularly add the sound track using Quik.  If a sound track is present on the video at this point, Quik will get confused, hence step 1.
9. I recommend not doing any titles, subtitles, or credits here, as Quik’s ability to do those is frustratingly limited.
10. Once content with the result, export back to iOS Photos.
11. Airdrop from iOS Photos into MacOS Photos
12. Switch on the Firewall. 
13. Import into iMovie
14. Add Titles, etc. using iMovie.
15. Export into final file / MacOS Theatre / Apple TV / Photos / etc.
16. Delete all temporary files.