I couldn’t be app-happier this week! Magisto is back!

For many, many years my very favorite video tool was Magisto. It was… magic.

Here’s how it worked:

1. Choose a theme.
2. Upload images and videos.
3. Choose a song.
4. Press a button.

Then Magisto would magically use AI capabilities that pre-dated the current AI boom to set your media to the beat, add special effects and even find the best parts of your video to make an instant montage.

The Death of Magisto

In 2019, YouTube competitor Vimeo bought it. And then Vimeo killed it.

Vimeo absorbed the Magisto magic into what it called “Vimeo Create.” But it was never the same.

At least once every six months I would visit Vimeo and try to make Vimeo Create do what Magisto did. And then I would search and search to find a similar tool. But nothing came close.

Magisto Reborn

And then yesterday I was prepping for a hands-on video workshop, and I noticed that the Magisto app in the Apple store under “Best Video-Editing Apps.” Magisto lives! Even the site is back (scroll down for a really big BUT).

A humble apology

Y’all. I am so sorry. It looks like Vimeo relaunched Magisto several years ago, and I just missed it completely. I humbly apologize for keeping this treasure from you for all these years. If I had known it was out there, I would have been using it and sharing it all along.

But wait — everything is not perfect.

Yes, Magisto was resurrected. But like the cat in the Stephen King story “Pet Sematary,” it is not quite the same.

1. It’s buggy as all get out.
   The app will crash if you choose a “Professional” or “Premium” theme. Sometimes.
2. The media library is weird.
   I couldn’t get it to connect to Google Photos, and the “recent uploads” folder wasn’t recent at all. I had to upload all the new media.
3. I’m worried about its longevity.
   The copyright date on the webpage is 2021, and that’s one of the many signs I see that Vimeo is no longer taking good care of Magisto. But I don’t care! I will never lose it again.
4. I don’t know about the paid versions.
   They have three paid levels and a free version as well. I had trouble figuring out which level would get you which templates.

Magisto Samples

To celebrate the rediscovery of the awesome-yet-flawed magic tool, I created two versions of two videos: one montage of my hubby, and a video of one of our community cats who needs a home!

Each video took maybe 3 minutes for the first draft then maybe 10 minutes of fine-tuning. After I was happy with the first videos of each, I simply changed the theme, song and shape for video two.