- Lawrence Ng
Instagram Reels Finally Releases in Singapore and the Philippines
Nearly a year and three months after it was released in over 50 countries including the United States, Instagram Reels finally comes to Singapore and the Philippines. This is the company's answer to TikTok, which achieved 1 billion monthly active users last month and was mentioned in Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg's post as a competitor to Facebook in terms of attracting young users.
With the new functionality, you can create and edit up to 60 seconds of short-form videos. You can create Reels and share them through Instagram Stories, Direct Messages, the News Feed and the brand new Reels tab. At the Reels tab, your Reels can be viewed by anyone from around the world. Here, you can also discover short-form videos of other users.
If you want to make a short-form video, you can record directly on Reels or retrieve a video from your camera roll. You can take advantage of some tools like "Speed", which lets you speed up or slow down a part of the video or audio that you selected. This is great if you want to make slow-motion or sped-up videos. Another tool called "Timer and Countdown" allows you to set a timer to film a Reel hands-free. A countdown from three to one will be seen onscreen once you press the record button, helping you prepare for the video. This will happen before the recording starts for the amount of time you selected.
There's also "Timed Text and Stickers" that can be placed at a selected point in your video. You can also align objects from a previous clip before you record the next one, which could make for seamless transitions. If you want to visually enhance your content, you can use "Touch-Up" to add and configure a smoothing effect to your video.
Aside from these tools, you can access new product updates such as Collabs, which lets you co-author Feed posts and Reels. From the tagging screen, you can invite another user to collaborate on a post or a Reel. If the other person accepts, your account and theirs will be seen in the post or the Reels header and the content will be shared with the followers of both accounts. The content will go live on both profiles and will have a shared view count, like count and comment thread.
For music lovers, they can use Superbeat and Dynamic/3D Lyrics. Superbeat applies special effects to the beat of the song a user chose to include in a video. Meanwhile, Dynamic and 3D Lyrics are lyric effects that show the song lyrics onscreen, making the Reel more engaging. Apart from that, you can now post photos and videos that are under a minute long through your desktop browser directly to Instagram.
If you don't see Instagram Reels on your app yet, then you can try updating it or closing and launching the app again.
Considering that Reels was launched globally in more than 50 countries in August 2020, Singapore and the Philippines received the functionality late. So did Malaysia, where Instagram Reels was made available to users in March 2021.
Written by Sophia Lopez