Marilyn García: I find it disappointing that 1SE keeps missing the mark with these new features: why only allow control over the speed of the final mashed video? Clearly some of the requests are referring to the speed of individual clips. This is the same thing that happened with the filter feature: instead of offering filters on individual snippets, there’s just a filter for the mashed video. It’s very frustrating as a user: every other app I pay for actually turns out new features at 10x the rate of 1SE and gets those features right. I’m on year 3 of pro and haven’t seen a single feature that reduces the friction of using the app. Given that I’m already importing everything to iMovie / Photos, it’s hard to see what the advantage of using 1SE is at this point. Hopefully you can pass this on to whomever is making the calls. I haven’t recommended this app to a single person since using it because the time required to make use of it is just too high; if mgmt is looking to boost sales: focus on improving UX (instead of, eg, poorly designed functionality meant to push users to share the app with their friends & family) and your users will proselytize.

For 3 years I’ve been waiting to be able to 1) share my account with my wife so we can contribute to the same ; 2) edit speed and filters on individual snippets from within 1SE; 3) know which photos / videos have already been used and still these basic features - which would greatly enhance the usability of the app - are not available.

jb: You're right that speeding up a single clip isn't part of this release. Could you let me know the last time you needed this feature and what you did as a work around? How many seconds did you want to squash into a 1.5s clip? When you speed up single snippets, do you usually mute them or leave the audio in place? Speeding up a video by a lot can cause the pitch to go up ("chipmunk voices") if not corrected for and I wonder whether that's a concern.

In case you're a pro subscriber, there's also the option to add up to ten seconds though that makes the final video longer and might not be what you want.

Hi jb, Vinh from the product team here. I understand your frustration and am sorry we've let you down!

Regarding collaboration: We released a Collab project type a few years back, that allows users to share and collaborate on freestyles with others. In practice we don't see much use on those and there seems to be mostly one person curating the entire project. We've also added crowds that allow users to share their daily snippets to others and have seen that work well in a small group context (grown up kids sharing with their parents, partner sharing content with their significant other etc).

We're always thinking of ways to allow users to do more with their journal. That said, sharing & contributing to a journal is currently not on the roadmap I'm afraid. Regarding 2) see my comment below, would love your input on this. On 3) That's something we should totally do. It will come with a bunch of improvements we want to add to make the snippet selector easier for new users to understand.

If you have some time to spare, would love to chat with you more in detail about your pain points with the app and more product ideas you might have: https://calendly.com/d/cnn-wgr-9gq/1se-product-chat

Thanks for all the feedback jb! Even though we might not be able to implement all of the feature requests (we're a very small team and really can't), it's very helpful to hear from y'all! We're especially interested in the underlying reasons/problems why you need a certain feature. That makes it easier for us to think of a solution that works for most of you. Sometimes, similar sounding feature requests like speed up can have different underlying motivations. For some it's to squash a longer situation into a second (my kids are particularly slow 😅), for others it's the need to speed up the entire mash because of length restrictions of the platform they want to share it to, others just want to shorten their video to match the attention span of their friends and family. This release serves the latter two cases, but doesn't for the first.

Vinh Dinh: I use it regularly on individual clips. Reducing anywhere from 30s to 3H of video to within the 10s max.

I use it less often than I’d like because it requires repeated importing into and exporting from iMovie (which adjusts for pitch) before importing the result to 1SE.

Generally I turn the volume down, but not off; however I’ll turn it off if it brings nothing to the clip.

Vinh Dinh: your comment about collaboration is the exact point I was trying to make: your users asked for the ability to collaborate on journals, instead 1SE invented “freestyle projects”; and “crowds” - it doesn’t seem the least bit surprising to me that you’ve seen low adoption rates for those features: 1SE is a video-JOURNAL app, not a collaborative video editing platform - surely that is (and the consequences are) obvious.

The journal (ie videos-by-date) is the only feature that makes the app more attractive than the free, more functional options of shared albums in Photos combined with, also free, iMovie (and their equivalents); ie 1SE makes it clear(ish) when a date has an entry (though there’s a lot of room to improve this).

My point is that something is off with the way the 1SE team is operating, if this isn’t obvious: other small teams crank out well-thought-out features on a regular basis that improve UX (emphasis on the UX, not the volume of features). I can’t say there’s been 1 feature in 3 years from 1SE that does the same (incidentally, the closest one is the collaboration - but it’s the same as the others: the implementation wasn’t thought through and so it is a pain to use: my wife edits and syncs to a collab (so she waits forever for each video to load because there are no bulk actions), then I have to go through and manually select one at a time to add to our journal, deleting each clip as I go, because there’s no way to tell if I’ve already added a clip to my journal, and no bulk actions; moreover, the default is to add those vids to the current date (seriously: how does that make any sense? Is there actually data that suggests that the date someone added a vid to a project is the date they’d like it to be added to in a journal (as opposed to the date the clip was taken)? I’d be really fascinated to know if that we’re the case). Then, because I’ve deleted the vids from the collab, to keep track of what’s been added, my wife doesn’t know what she’s added already: this means (what should be) the simple task of building a fun video journal with my wife requires a farcical level of coordination and a lot of time. That’s not even getting into the fact that she doesn’t have a copy of the journal that she can edit, directly or share with others, nor the time spent editing content in other apps, first…

Regarding 2: this release doesn’t even address the use cases outlined by users who wanted to control playback of the mashed vid: one person explicitly mentioned wanting to slow down playback for her elderly mother, and the feature released, which doesn’t address the request of the other half of users on this thread (now marked as “complete”), doesn’t even give you the option of slowing down playback.

My point here is that there are several things going wrong for this to happen: a) disparate requests are being grouped under a single banner which sets the stage for miscommunication with users and suggests little attention is paid to what users are actually asking for (mashed speed vs clip speed could easily have separate tickets, making it easier to tell which mattered most to people); b) … honestly, it’s not worth the time elaborating - but think of how it looks (and, honestly, what it says about the process) that the v1 ignored the explicit request of a user to slow the vid down: that’s not a technical challenge, that’s not out-of-scope, that’s either not caring or not paying attention or not reading, isn’t it? And those are all the same thing, at the end of the day. Again, this is just an example - mistakes happen - but when there is a consistent pattern, it’s no longer individual error, there’s a systemic issue with the way things are being done.

Another example: filters. Users request the ability to add filters to content and the feature that’s delivered is the ability to apply a single filter to the entire mashed vid. Again, while there may be a use case for that, it seems blindingly obvious that, in general, no one wants to apply a single filter to photos and videos taken on different days, under different conditions. Can you imagine if Apple’s Photos app only let you pick a filter that applied to every photo in your library?

I’m also surprised that you guys didn’t just add playback speed controls to the in-app playback: I suspect that a lot of users would’ve preferred that to (or appreciated it, in addition to) having to export a new version of the vid just to see what the playback speed would be like. And that, along with orientation control, is a trivial feature to add to a video player.

I really want to continue using this app, but it’s hard to justify continuing to pay for 1SE, esp. knowing that there is no plan to support sharing of a journal.

Ps you’ve offered your calendar before, but I value my time and already feel I’ve spent too much of it providing the feedback I have; only one of us is paid to participate in this exchange.

Marilyn García: woohoo!!!