Back in 2011 when I decided to shift the focus of my website to my guitar fascination (prior to 2011 I used this site for my graphic design fascination), I had a small obsession with the wonders of iOS. Today I still do. I’m not currently writing about it as much, but I realised today that last year—2014—I continued to use iOS for my social media usage and monitoring, content discovery, video editing, guitar recording, photography and a whole lot more. So as I look back on the year that was, I thought I’d use iOS to put together a homage to my version of 2014.
It’s a 15 second video. It’s going to take me longer than that to explain how it was created though.
Fast right? That’s because of the metal track I recorded for the video. Not really. Instagram simply has a 15 second maximum video length and I wanted to showcase at least nine images.
How I put the video together went a little like this.
- Import my favourite Instagram photos in the Frametastic app (iPhone) to generate the movie file.
- Export the video to the iOS Camera Roll.
- Upload the video to DropBox using the iOS app.
- Record the drums and guitar using the iOS version of AmpliTube (iPad) by IK Multimedia.
- Export the metal track and upload to DropBox (I emailed the track to my iPhone directly from AmpliTube).
- Open Pinnacle Studio for iOS (iPad) and download the audio and video into a new video project.
- Trim audio to the 15 seconds the video is already set to, fade the audio at the beginning and end and export to DropBox.
- Open the DropBox app on the iPhone, save the uploaded video to the Camera Roll and upload to Instagram as a video.
Simple right?! One thing I will point out is that Pinnacle Studio doesn’t create square videos. So the video you export will be landscape (like all good movies are) with black edges to the left and right of the imported square content. When you then import the video into Instagram the image is automatically cropped to a square. Because Pinnacle Studio centres the imported video and Instagram crops to the centre of any video, all the hard work is done for you. Perfect centring. Your video is perfectly square once again. Awesome.
Anyhow, if you’re interested in seeing the images in that video at your own speed (without audio), please use the slideshow below. If you’d like to see more than nine images (because I did take a lot more than that in 2014), then head on over to my Instagram account. With Winter NAMM coming, that account is about to get hammered with guitar imagery. It should be awesome.
Seymour Duncan strap 
Marshalls 
Schecter and amps 
Amplifiers 
Wheel of guitars 
Lego pedal 
Plectrums of LPs 
Epiphone Les Paul 
Moniker custom reedsdale