Videos are an increasingly popular form of communication, a direct way to get in touch with other users. That's why so many people are passionate about video editing, customizing their movies with cuts, filters and soundtracks. One of the most popular effects is slow motion, which allows you to reduce the playback speed of frames, resulting in a rather eye-catching result.
Here are the best apps for slowing down videos on Android and iOS, including some useful tips on how to make the best use of the slow motion effect.
Apps for slowing down videos on Android (smartphones and tablets)
There are many apps on the market available for download, even for free, to slow down the speed of videos and create the slow motion effect. Here are the best apps for video editing on Android.
Efectum
One of the best apps for making slow motion videos on Android is Efectum, a free downloadable app on Google Play Store. Efectum lets you apply various effects to your videos, slow, fast and backwards, plus you can set multiple speeds, insert audio tracks within the videos, crop the videos and apply timelapse functionality. The app supports various video formats, including AVI, MPG, MKV, MP4 and WVM, is pretty easy to use and allows you to add the slow motion effect to any movie saved in the internal memory.
VideoShow
A pretty efficient app for slowing down videos on Android is VideoShow, available in both the free version and the HD resolution and advanced features package, which can be downloaded for a cost of €17.55. With the free app you can not only make slow motion videos, but also edit any movie thanks to an editing system, making cuts and compressing videos to reduce their size, insert music by choosing from over 1000 songs available for free, add text, filters and predefined layouts.
PowerDirector
To create slow motion videos just download PowerDirector, a video editing app for Android with lots of advanced features, compatible with any smartphone and tablet with Android version from 4.3 onwards. The app lets you make videos from scratch, or import footage from other apps like Facebook and YouTube, even in HD. You can slow down videos, superimpose PiP (Picture-in-Picture) movies, achieve up to Full HD 4K resolution, add over 35 different effects, insert photos and audio tracks, and create cool transitions.
Slow Motion Frame Video Player
Slow Motion Frame Video Player
Easy and intuitive, Slow Motion Frame Video Player is definitely one of the best slow motion video apps on Android, capable of slowing down any movie recorded with your phone while maintaining good quality resolution. The app is free and lightweight, with a size of just 2.9 MB, thanks to the presence of very few additional features, in fact it doesn't have an advanced and complete editing program like other apps. At the same time it allows you to apply slow motion to your videos, add audio and set filters.
Video Speed
Video Speed lets you perfectly manage the playback speed of your videos, decreasing or increasing the timing according to your needs. It's a free app unfortunately only available in English, which doesn't strain your CPU too much thanks to a weight of only 12 MB. It also launched the latest version updated in May 2019, with which some bugs have been fixed. With Video Speed you can't perform professional video editing, however you can create slow motion effects in a few moments, or speed up frames by customizing each movie.
Slow Motion Video Maker
Downloadable for free on the Google Play Store, Slow Motion Video Maker is a pretty easy-to-use app for slowing down videos on Android, compatible with smartphones and tablets running Android OS from version 4.1 onwards. With this app you can achieve a slow motion effect, rotate videos by 90 degrees, add text and music tracks, apply emoji and stickers. Once you've edited the video you can share it on social networks, uploading it to Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, or compress the file to save space in your phone's memory.
Apps to slow down videos on iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch)
Not only Android, also for Apple smartphones, along with iPad and iPod Touch, you can download numerous apps to edit videos. Here are what are the best apps to create slow motion effect with the iOS operating system.
App Photos
The first option create slow motion effects on iOS is the native Photos app, installed on all iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch. The program lets you trim videos by making a quick edit, decreasing their overall length or eliminating some frames, or slowing down a video entirely or only in some places. To do this, just open App Photos on your device, set the slow motion mode and start recording, or select a movie and tap Edit to apply the slow motion effect.
Slo Mo Video
An app for slowing down videos on iPhone IOS is Slo Mo Video, a useful and quite functional application for editing movies, which allows you not to lose the quality of your recordings. With this program you can set the speed of videos, applying the slow motion effect or speeding up the playback of frames, either with movies saved in the phone's memory or by creating new recordings. The app is available for €3.49, in English only, with support for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch with iOS version 8.0 and higher.
Slow Fast Slow
Slow fast Flow is a free iOS app, compatible with iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch with iOS version 10.0 and higher. With the app you can make very sharp slow motion videos, and thanks to the built-in editing program you can create your own movies, for example by slowing down only certain points or speeding up the playback of frames in other sections. The application is very popular with users, it works flawlessly and does not slow down the performance of the device, it is easy to use and provides some graphic templates to modify the design of the videos.
Slow Motion
Although it is not a very recent application, Slow Motion allows you to decrease and increase the speed of videos directly from your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch iOS, provided that you have an operating system version of at least 8.0 installed. Once downloaded on your terminal, it allows you to edit your videos, with slow motion effects and frame accelerations, while it does not provide video editing features. The app works with both new recordings and already saved ones, so you can change the playback speed of any video in your phone or tablet's memory.
iMovie
One of the best video editing apps on iOS is undoubtedly iMovie, a powerful and efficient program with which to edit and slow down your movies. The application can be downloaded from iTunes for free, and is also available in Italian. Inside it has several advanced features, in fact you can create slow motion effects, save movies with 4K resolution, apply graphic filters, insert text and audio tracks. In addition, you can upload files directly to iCloud Drive, or share them on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram quickly.
How slow motion videos work
One of the most used effects of video editing is the slow motion mode, with which you can decrease the playback speed of the movie. This is a technique invented by cinema, specifically discovered in 1904 by August Musger, who at that time managed to change the speed of recordings using rather rudimentary but effective solutions. Each video is composed of a series of frames, called frames, instant photographs that together form a movie, giving the impression of movement.
After the success of the action cam GoPro, today even modern cameras of smartphones and tablets allow you to make many frames per second, with a playback frequency that is usually fixed, to simulate a condition as natural as possible. Video editing apps, on the other hand, allow you to change the speed, so you can slow down a video by increasing the interval between the playback of one frame and the next, creating the slow motion effect.
The normal speed of a video is 24 fps, 24 frames per second, while Android and iOS apps are able to change this value. At the same time, the quality of the final result depends on the initial frames, for example, recordings up to 30 fps cannot be slowed down, those from 30 to 60 fps can undergo a halving of the speed, movies made on 80-90 fps can undergo a reduction of up to a third, while videos at 240 fps can endure a high slowdown, up to 10 times the initial speed without losing quality.
How to make video slow down on Android and iOS
As we saw earlier, you can apply the slow motion effect to your videos on any Android and iOS device, either by using the native apps available for the latest generation terminals, or by downloading apps that allow you to change the playback speed of video recordings. To do so, simply open the camera, select slow motion mode and start recording, to lengthen the video by at least 10 seconds.
Also, with some apps you can edit your movies, to insert slow motion only at some specific points in the video. You have to open the app, choose the movie, select the start and end point of the cut, enable the slow motion effect and save the updated file. Many apps offer rather simple and intuitive graphical interfaces, so often it's enough to move the virtual cursor or selector to decrease or increase the speed at which the frames are played back.
Of course, the better the quality of the smartphone or iPhone camera, the better the final result will be, since a higher number of initial frames allows you to slow down the video while maintaining a high quality. For this reason it is important to adapt the intervention to the type of camera installed, otherwise you risk obtaining unpleasant videos, with grainy and blurred graphics. Slow motion allows you to make particularly impressive videos, but like all effects you should not abuse it, otherwise it could make the recording unpleasant.