If you have a camera from GoPro or Insta360, it’s worthwhile to spend some time getting to know the respective official app. For one thing, you need to use that app to move clips to your phone. And while CapCut and other third-party editing apps have more options, beginners can get most of what they need from these official apps alone.
Top pick
This app lets you easily create videos, with optional cloud uploads and automatic editing (albeit at the cost of an annual subscription).
GoPro Quik (Mac and iOS and Android; Windows version coming later in 2024) lets you control GoPro cameras remotely and also includes a solid editing suite. Compared with more robust editors like CapCut, Quik is best for beginners who want a little hand-holding as they learn the ins and outs of the editing process.
Quik’s most useful feature is its ability to automatically upload videos to the GoPro cloud, which then edits them together into a single highlight video with music and transitions that it delivers to you ready for posting. You need a yearly subscription to access this feature, but it also gives you unlimited storage for footage that you capture on your GoPro camera.
GoPro Quik produces generally good-looking automatically edited videos, but in our testing it often inserted clips in the wrong orientation, as in this video.
This automatic editing works as expected, in that you get a single video containing all of a day’s footage in an almost entirely hands-off manner. However, the result is usually more of a place to start your own editing process than a polished, finished product.
For instance, Quik has trouble recognizing upside-down footage, and it can often highlight and linger on boring shots for an inexplicably long time. Fortunately, you can easily go into the video and adjust the individual clips, the length of the overall video, the music, and so on.
Additional tips:
- Once you download the footage from your camera into the app, no matter what you do you’ll need to save it again to your phone’s picture gallery in order to find it. Otherwise it stays “stuck” in the app.
- Sometimes the automatic video takes a while to come back from the cloud. If you don’t want to wait, you can manually select clips and have the app create a video from those. This method prevents you from doing anything else with your phone for the duration of the processing, however.
- When manually editing your video, you can also add any other images or videos from your phone not recorded with the GoPro camera.
Top pick
This robust and surprisingly elaborate video editor has more depth than GoPro Quik and also offers some AI-enhanced features, including automatic edits. But it takes some time to master.
Insta360’s app (iOS, Android) has a lot more going on than GoPro Quik—visually, at least—but the core features, including remote camera control and video editing, with optional automatic video generation, are very similar. The editing tools are more robust than Quik’s, offering more control over your videos with a layout similar to CapCut’s.
If Quik is for beginners looking for a bit of help as they learn, Insta360’s app is a great middle ground between that and CapCut. If you’re already familiar with mobile video editing, you can find just about every feature you want here, minus some of the more advanced AI features and TikTok integration from CapCut. But Insta360’s app also provides some free features, such as a variety of transitions between video clips, that CapCut gives you only in its paid Pro version.
If you’re editing 360 footage, you need to use the Insta360 app to make shareable clips, even if you want to send it to CapCut later on. Editing 360 video takes a few extra steps compared with “normal” video, but the app does a great job of making the process fairly straightforward.
Insta360’s app can create “AI”-generated auto-cuts that splice together clips with a vibe-appropriate soundtrack. In general, we found that they came out slightly better than GoPro Quik’s comparable automatic edits.
The app has an on-device “AI” auto editor that works with both 360 and regular content, though it tends to be a little swoopy for my tastes with 360 clips (by default, the camera angle moves a lot, though you can adjust it). When it comes to non-360 footage, I’ve gotten better automatic results from Insta360’s app than GoPro’s cloud editor, but in both cases some additional manual tweaking of the results yields better videos overall.
Insta360’s biggest advantage over GoPro Quik is its use of proxy files—lower-resolution duplicate files that allow for fast editing even on older, slower phones. Insta360 then uses the full-resolution files to create the final video. The process is generally smooth—and it’s necessary since videos from the Insta360 X4 and AcePro cameras can be up to 8K resolution, which can bog down even the fastest phones.
Additional tips:
- Editing 360 videos takes some practice. In addition to handling all the normal video editing (cuts, speed, and so on), you also need to determine the direction and movement of the virtual camera. The Insta360 app offers suggestions, but figuring it out yourself is worth the time and effort.
- Regular photos and videos save to your phone’s gallery automatically, but 360 clips need to be edited in some way first.
- Once you’ve created your video, which can include non-Insta360 clips and photos, you need to export it. Depending on your phone, this process can take a few minutes, especially at higher resolutions and quality. The same is true of all video-editing apps, though GoPro can do some editing in the cloud and allow you to use your phone for something else.
- Insta360’s app includes a lot of transitions (stylistic ways to cut between video clips) that other editors like CapCut include only in their expensive paid options. Transitions can make a video far more interesting and professional-looking.
