GoPro QuikStories Automatically Edits Your Video, But Is It Any Good?

GoPro has a shiny new editing app that promises to take the hard work out of turning your adventures into a ready-to-share video – automatically.

We got hands on with QuikStories to see if it really is that simple.

It’s worth noting I have zero editing skills. None. I’ve opened editing software before, looked at it in mild terror, and closed it again. I’m impatient. I’m time poor. I’m not going to spend my precious time making fancy videos for social media. So QuikStories, it seems, is aimed at people just like me.

You’ll need to have the GoPro app and the Quik app installed and ready to go, then after recording your footage on the Hero5 (short, five to 30 second bursts of recording are recommended for the best results, but more on that later), the footage is transferred via wi-fi to your phone.

The app will then load up all of your scenes, ready to be either automatically made into a video, or for you to edit up yourself. Warning: this will be far more time consuming than you anticipate.

Once in the app you can choose text, a filter, the style of transitions, music, effect for the chosen footage. The app will automatically include the files on your GoPro, but you can add in any videos already on your phone. There’s an option for the app to choose the “best” short grabs of each scene for the final edit, but I found this was, more often than not, pretty terrible at working out exactly what a good shot was.

Jumping in to each scene to trim the length and edit it down to the actual best bits was the option I ended up going for, since the automatic edit was a bit all over the place. Most of my scenes did push the end-limit of that 30 second recommendation. If your scenes are super short, and quite static, this shouldn’t be as much of a problem for you as it was for me.

The options for filters and transitions range from subtle to actual star-wipe, and you don’t have to stick with the music the app provides – you can choose your own. Just be careful of any copyright issues when uploading to YouTube.

Our video took about 20 minutes in total to get the edit right, and there are still a few issues – sometimes edits didn’t stick for the final stage, or footage would double up. The app we played with was in Beta, though, so you may not have these problems at all.

I’ll definitely be giving the more “automatic” options of the app another go on my weekly hikes, taking into consideration the preference for shorter, less dynamic footage. Keep an eye on Gizmodo’s Instagram, as I’ll pop them up there for you.

I have no real desire to jump in and do the “refined edit” again – it just took too long for my liking. But I’m sure there’s plenty of people that enjoy that kind of thing.

If you want to give it a try, you can grab the GoPro app from the Apple App Store or Google Play.


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