What is the Twitter Vine Video App?
Vine video is a free mobile video app that lets users shoot 6-second video clips and loop them using an innovative start-and-stop touch-screen interface. Twitter owns Vine and rolled it out in the iTunes App Store in January 2013. The app is only available initially for the iPod Touch and iPhones 3GS and higher, but other versions are in the works, too.
Users can share their clips on Twitter and with other users of the app on Vine's own network.
One innovative aspect is how the videos are automatically looped, so the 6 seconds of sound and motion repeats unless a viewer taps on the video to stop it. Another innovation is the recording interface--you can repeatedly start and stop recording any Vine video clip simply by touching your phone's screen, thus allowing you to quickly splice together different video segments into a micro movie of sorts. The Vine blog highlights the creative potential for quirky short clips.
How do you Sign up for Vine and Get Started?
After you download the free app from the App Store and fire it up on your phone, you'll see a couple of permission requests from Vine. The app will ask if it can push notifications to you and also if it can access your location information to identify where videos were shot.
Next will be the sign up screen shown above. You can choose to sign in with your Twitter account, which will allow you to instantly tweet links to any Vine videos you shoot out to your Twitter followers.
Or you can simply submit your email address to get a new account.
Either way, Vine will ask you to create a unique user name and password (passwords must be at least 8 characters long and contain at least one number.)
Next, You'll see your profile page. If you've selected to sign in through Twitter, Vine creates a profile on your behalf by pulling your Twitter name and info. You can change, it, though. And you can add this information to your profile yourself if you've opted not to connect to Twitter.
Vine Video Home Page and Explore Page
When you finish with the profile boxes, which are short, you'll go to a home page of sorts, which contains a stream of videos from other Vine users in a vertical scrolling area. It should look like the image above, which has an I love New York image prominently displayed at the top of the page.
On Vine, this image appears similar to an animated GIF, even though it's not a GIF at all. It creates the impression of animation because the person making the video shot the text from a variety of distances and then started and stopped his camera action, resulting in the impression of motion.(There are plenty of other apps for creating actual mobile GIF files.
The home page typically has a Vine video clip in the middle. On the upper left is the "home button" and on the upper right is a little movie camera icon, which is what you click to go to the recording screen for shooting your Vine videos. Most annoying, there's a banner ad across the top of the home page.
If you scroll down your Vine home page by swiping your finger up and down on your iPhone, you'll see other Vine videos users have shot, along with comments other users have made about them.
If you touch the "home" button while on the home page, you'll see a menu drop down, with these choices: Home, Explore, Activity, Profile.
Vine Explore Page, Good for Sampling Video
The "Explore" button takes you to the category page shown in the image above. It lets you browse videos other Vine users have shot and classified using popular hashtags. People using tags like #magic for stop-action shots, and #pets for those ever popular animal videos.The category page also has a "popular now" option that lets you see videos which have received a lot of likes.
Next: Creating Video with Vine
It's easy to shoot a Vine video. First, touch the movie camera icon at the top right side of your app.
You'll see a viewing box across the middle of the screen, with a Black X at upper right, as shown in the image above.
Your phone's video camera will automatically be activated and start focusing. When you've framed the action you want, just touch your phone's screen and HOLD YOUR FINGER down on the screen.
As soon as you lift your finger off the screen, it will stop recording. But the video clip doesn't conclude; it just pauses until you touch the screen again to restart recording the same clip.
This now-on, now-off recording capability allows aspiring mini-movie makers to have fun with stop-motion shots by repositioning the same object while the camera's on pause, then touching the screen again and shooting the same item in a different position. Doing this a couple of times creates the impression of animation, which is why a lot of people say Vine video clips often resemble photos stitched together to create an animated GIF.
The recording interface shows a green line moving across the top of the screen, showing how far along in the 6 seconds you are. When it's green all the way across, your 6 seconds are all used up. You can click the black "X" at upper right at any time and then confirm to delete a video before it's saved or shared.
When you're done shooting a video, Vine asks if you want to share it and where. The workable options are either Twitter or just Vine. Facebook also is listed an option, but at launch time it wasn't working.
"Share on Vine" is checked by default, but you can uncheck it if you want your video to be private, and store it only in you Camera Roll. Even if you haven't previously granted Vine access to your Twitter account, you can check the Twitter button here on the sharing page and it will grab your Twitter account information for sending a tweet containing a link to your Vine video.
Click the green "DONE" button at the bottom of the screen when you're done.
Vine will show you an uploading bar while the upload is in progress. Sometimes it doesn't work and shows an "upload failed" message. Other times, the video will appear with a "waiting" message next to the video image. Try clicking the "uploading" button again if your video gets hung up on the "waiting" list.
Other Mobile Video Options
Instagram video is another popular option for shooting mobile video and sharing it through social networks. People think of Instagram as a photo sharing app, but it added a video recording feature in June 2013. The main differences with Vine are twofold: first, its videos can be about twice as long, up to 15 seconds. Second, it doesn't automatically loop its videos, they basically play once and users can opt to replay. See our illustrated guide to shooting Instagram videos for detailed instructions.