VSCO’s stylish filters can now be applied to videos

VSCO is getting into video. Starting today, the photo filtering company is beginning to introduce video editing capabilities to its flagship app. Naturally, they’ll revolve around filters. But there’s one big downside: the video features are only being given to paying subscribers. TechCrunch first reported the update.

For now, at least, editing seems to be limited to coloring and grading an image. So you’ll be able to apply filters and tweak aspects of a video like contrast and saturation, but it sounds like you won’t be able to trim a clip or cut multiple clips together, making it a pretty basic tool.

Still, VSCO’s photo filters often make for some great looking images. And if it can recreate that with video, it may well find some fans — there are certainly editors who’d be happy to use VSCO’s photo presets in Premiere if that were an option. The tools are only available on iOS for now, but they’re supposed to launch on Android “soon.”

And it’s likely there’s more to come. VSCO says it’s releasing an “early access version” of the feature today, which implies that it isn’t finished yet.

Unfortunately, the feature is only being released to people who pay for VSCO’s $19.99 per year membership program, called VSCO X, which basically just gives you access to a bunch of filters you can probably buy for cheaper than $20, as well as some bonus filters that you can’t buy outright. While it’s frustrating that free users won’t be able to try out the video editing tools, keeping them exclusive to VSCO X certainly sounds like a good way to drive subscriptions.

On a somewhat related note, VSCO’s UI remains entirely unintelligible.