Vine introduces Sessions and Time Travel
Yesterday Vine, the six-second social video app, announced that it’s introducing two significant updates to the platform that are available to download today.
The first, “Sessions”, allows you save your posts for later. You can now work on up to ten posts at a time and come back to any of them to carry on creating your Vine.
The second, “Time Travel”, lets you replace, remove and reorganise any shot within a clip before publishing it, simply by tapping ‘edit’ when you’re previewing a post.
Before these changes, Vines were made up of a sequence of consecutive shots. After creating a Vine users had two options: share it, or delete it. Now, if there’s a certain shot a user doesn’t like, they can edit it out without having to do a retake. And then save the Vine and upload it at a later date, allowing much more flexibility.
These changes are pretty useful from a brand perspective. Up to now, Vine has had some major limitations for marketers. The inability to edit visual footage or audio, lack of scheduling or saving options and the restriction on native uploads has proven an issue for the brands trying to use it.
There were positive elements to these limitations, in that it created a level playing field between consumers and brands, because there was no real scope for throwing money at the editing process.
However, the limitations proved restrictive to brands that have high standards of quality control or clearly defined visual identities. The updates announced yesterday should help increase the amount of innovation on the platform and make it even more popular with brands; something that is necessary to keep rivalling its major competitor, Instagram video. Vine itself stated that the updates should make it easier to “capture life in motion”, while offering “new ways for people to express themselves and their creativity.
https://twitter.com/vineapp/status/393415348898115585
Some restrictions still remain, such as the six-second limit for videos and the fact that there’s no way of uploading previously filmed footage into the app, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Not only do they keep Vine standing out from other social video platforms, they also mean marketers still have to use their creativity to work around these constraints to produce great content.
But, these updates will certainly make life easier for marketers using the platform, many of whom have been criticised for the shoddy content that often results from lack of capacity for editing. It makes Vine more accessible, which will mean a significant improvement in the quality of the content produced on the platform and it is likely to increase the appeal of using Vine as part of brand’s social media strategies.