I’ve been playing around with video recording and editing for a number of years. One constant with video editing that can always be counted on is that it’s editing video is time-consuming.

That is all about to change. Enter Videolicious, a FREE video app for iOS. This is an amazing app. Videolicious makes it possible to produce short (up to about 50 second) videos in a tightly-edited, documentary style complete with background music and voiceovers.

You start by recording short video clips. I do this all the time – I have my own name for them – “video snapshots.” I take plenty of short video clips, generally following the “rule of thirds” for good photography and holding the camera as steady as possible, compensating for the cheesy fixed iPod camera lens by getting in close and using angles as much as possible to create visual interest.

Once you have up to 10 video clips, you are ready to quickly put them together into a movie in Videolicious. Step One in Videolicious is to select the video clips or still photos from the iPod (or iPhone or iPad) Camera Roll. Touching the thumbnail in the sequence you want to talk about the clips and photos will number them. You can have up to ten per video.

Once You have selected your clips and/or photos, you move to Step Two. Record up to a 50 second long video of yourself talking about the clips, ideally in the order you numbered them in when you selected them in Step One.

Once you have recorded yourself talking about the clips and/or photos, Step Three consists of selecting background music. Videolicious comes with six background tracks though you can also select any other track present on your iPod. I suggest sticking with one of the tracks that comes with Videolicious, since these are public domain and will keep you out of trouble with the copyright police if you share your video publically on sites such as YouTube or Facebook. Once you have selected your track, the video will quickly render into a final *.MOV file, ready to share with the world.

The remarkable breakthrough with Videolicious is that it has predefined parameters that it follows in order to create a tightly-edited final result. Playback starts with video of you talking and then quickly cuts to the scenes you have selected in the order you selected them. Still shots automatically have the so-called “Ken Burns” effect applied. At the end of the video the shot cuts back to you ending your description of the clips, resulting in a brisk documentary style video that takes what would have been boring clips by themselves and makes them into visual elements of your spoken story discussion of the clips.

It is possible to produce a tightly-edited, to-the-point video in just a few minutes and share that with the world, which is an amazing accomplishment.

Videolicious is not a replacement for traditional video editors. It is a way of placing video clips into bins where the software itself decides makes most of the editing decisions. Videolicious spits out surprisingly watchable, entertaining results in a matter of a few minutes. This is a task that can easily take hours with traditional video editing tools.