Takes: Creator Video Editor

Takes is a video editor for talking to camera. Record your takes the way you always do, retakes and all. Takes cuts the pauses as they come in, groups the lines you said more than once so you can keep the take you like, and gives you text, layers and a voiceover before you save to Photos. No account, no ads, no tracking.

SILENCES Your takes arrive with the pauses already cut. Choose Punchy or Natural, fine-tune how long a pause must be and how much room to leave around your words, and run it on one clip or all of them. Nothing is thrown away: undo the cut, or drag a clip's edge to bring a pause back.

BEST TAKES Say a line three times and one tap on Best Takes groups the tries into one clip with a "3 takes" badge. Tap through them and swap any one in place. It starts on your last full take and marks false starts, and Ungroup puts every take back.

TEXT Tap Text and type: your words appear on the video as you go. There are 94 fonts, each shown in its own style, and Recent rows keep your last fonts and colours to hand. Pick a look (Plain, Outline, Box or Soft), one of 12 colours or your own with the eyedropper, and one of five outline thicknesses. While you type, drag the slider on the left edge of the picture up or down to make the words bigger or smaller, and the lines re-wrap as you go. Pinch, drag and twist to place them.

TEXT ANIMATIONS Select a caption and tap Animate. Choose how it comes in (29 Ins, from Fade, Pop and Typewriter to Write-on, Ink bloom and Sticker slap), how it leaves (27 Outs), or how it flows into the caption right after it (Crossfade, Push, Font morph or Magic move). Each tile shows the animation in your own font and colours, and one slider sets its length, from 0.1 to 3 seconds.

ASPECT RATIO Stay on 9:16 or switch to 1:1, 16:9, 4:3 or 3:4 from the button beside Export. Your footage is fitted whole on black, never cropped, and you can pinch a clip to fill the frame. Switch back and everything is where you left it.

LAYERS Put photos, B-roll and screen recordings over your video, from Recents or any of your albums. Move, scale, rotate and crop each one, set its opacity, and bring it forward or send it back. Transparent PNGs stay transparent.

VOICEOVER Record a voiceover while your video plays, or use the sound from another video. Retry in one tap, then trim it, cut its pauses and set its volume.

THE TIMELINE Pinch from the whole video down to single frames. Trim with snapping, cut at the playhead, duplicate, and long-press to reorder; delete a clip and the gap closes. Change speed from 0.25× to 8× and keep your natural pitch, or turn a quiet take up to 200%. Undo and redo as often as you like while you edit.

FEED PREVIEW One tap lays a short-video feed's buttons and caption over your 9:16 video, with your own handle and photo, so you can see what they will cover. It never appears in your export.

EXPORT Export in 1080p at 30 or 60 fps, or 4K at 60 fps, in your project's shape, with an estimate of the file size first. Hold the button to start, and the video lands in a Takes album in Photos. No watermark. Your export matches the preview, text and animations included.

PROJECTS Takes opens straight to your projects, with no sign-up, and they save as you go. Pin the ones you want to keep. Old projects clear themselves out after 3 to 30 days unopened, or never; pinned and never-exported projects are kept, a deleted project waits 3 days in Recently Deleted, and clean-up never touches your Photos.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN No account, no ads, no tracking. Takes collects no data and sends nothing off your iPhone: editing, speech recognition and export all happen on the phone. Your videos stay in Photos: projects link to them instead of copying them. iOS itself may download its speech model the first time you use Best Takes, and your originals from iCloud Photos.

For iPhone, in portrait. Requires iOS 26 or later. The app is in English.