AI Video Editor, Reels: inMelo

Review by eFreeware

The thing that sets inMelo apart is the beat. Every transition in the app is designed to land on the music, so a template does not just arrange your photos and clips, it times the cuts to the track underneath. That single idea shapes everything else the app does, from the tempo editor to the lyric video tools. Rather than asking you to build a timeline from scratch, it hands you a rhythm and asks you to fill it.

That makes it a natural fit for people who post short vertical video and want it to look deliberate without learning a desktop editor. If you shoot on a phone, have a folder of photos and clips sitting unused, and want something that reads as a finished Reel or Short rather than a slideshow, this is the audience the developer is writing for. It is also a reasonable entry point for someone who has never cut a video before, because the template carries most of the decisions.

It is not a general-purpose editor in the sense a hobbyist filmmaker might expect. Music-driven templates, effects and quick output for social platforms are the focus of the whole product. I would go in expecting a tool that makes one style of video very quickly rather than one that gives you fine control over everything.

Templates carry the editing

The headline feature is a library of more than a thousand video templates, organized by theme. The developer lists marketing, beat-driven, lyric, aesthetic, retro and mood categories, and there are dedicated sets for occasions such as Christmas, New Year, Valentine's Day and birthdays. Some of the Reels templates are free, which matters if you want to try the workflow before committing to anything.

In practice a template works as a shell: you bring the photos and clips, the template supplies the pacing, the transitions and the text styling. That is the part I would expect to save the most time, because matching cuts to a track by hand is the fiddliest job in short-form editing. The developer also mentions art-style text presets, which suggests titles and captions get the same treatment rather than being left as plain text.

The trade-off is inherent to the approach. Templates reward you for having material that fits them, and they constrain how much you can deviate before the result stops looking intentional. If your footage is unusual in length or framing, you will be adjusting clips to suit the template rather than the other way around. The app does include basic clip adjustments for exactly that reason, but the template still sets the terms.

AI effects and the cartoon generator

Beyond templates, the app leans on a set of AI-driven effects. The cartoon generator turns photos into cartoon avatars, and the developer describes a range of artistic styles to choose from. A set of body effects is delivered through templates, meant to make footage look more striking. These are the kind of features that produce a recognizable look quickly, and they are clearly aimed at the same social audience as the rest of the app.

The automatic editor is the other notable piece. It takes your videos and photos and assembles them into a finished piece without you placing anything manually, which is the fastest possible route from a camera roll to something postable. I would treat that as a starting point rather than a finished product: automatic assembly tends to get the broad shape right and leave the details for you.

Elsewhere the toolkit is conventional but broad. There is a tempo editor for cutting, merging, flipping and rotating clips, a photo slideshow maker that combines multiple images into one music video, and a stack of effects including cutout, blur, glitch, neon, doodle, emoji and love. None of this is exotic, but together it covers the moves most short-form videos actually use.

Music, audio and beat-synced effects

Music is the spine of the app, so it is worth looking at what you get. A built-in library covers a range of styles for most photo-video needs. You can also pull audio out of an existing video, which is the practical route if you want to reuse a track you already have rather than hunt through the library.

The beat-synced transitions are where this pays off. Because the effects are timed to the music, the choice of track changes the feel of the whole video, not just the soundtrack. That is a genuine creative lever, and it means swapping the audio is one of the more effective ways to rework a project that is not landing.

The effects list supports the same idea: glitch, neon, slow motion and freeze are all effects that read as rhythmic when they hit on a beat. If you are making lyric videos, the combination of text presets, music and beat timing is the core workflow. Story posts and anniversary cards are also among the outputs, so the app is not limited to one format even though Reels and Shorts are clearly the priority.

What it asks of you

inMelo is free to download, contains ads and offers in-app purchases. I would treat the free download as the way in. The sensible approach is to try the free templates first and see whether the workflow suits you before spending anything.

The practical requirement is more about material than money. This is a phone-first editor built around importing photos and clips you already have, so the quality of what you feed it matters more than any setting inside the app. Videos save in HD quality, which is the right baseline for posting to social platforms.

The content rating is Teen, which is worth noting if you are setting this up on a shared family device. The app has been updated since launch. That is a normal maintenance rhythm for an app of this kind.

Getting a good result out of it

The most reliable way to use an app like this is to pick the music before you pick the template. Since the transitions follow the beat, the track determines the pacing, and choosing a template that already matches the tempo of your audio saves a lot of fiddling. If you have a specific song in mind, extracting the audio from a video you already own is the cleanest route in.

Second, gather more material than you think you need. Slideshow and template workflows burn through photos quickly, and having a dozen extra images on hand makes it much easier to fill a section that does not sit right. Sorting your camera roll before you start is dull, but it is the difference between a template that flows and one that limps.

Third, use the automatic editor as a rough cut. Let it assemble something, then adjust the clips that do not fit and swap the effects that feel wrong. That order of operations plays to the app's strengths: it gets you to a complete video fast, and your time goes into the handful of moments that actually need attention.

Finally, keep the destination in mind while you edit. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube and WhatsApp are among the share targets, and vertical short-form is what the templates are built for. A video assembled with those platforms in mind will need far less reworking than one that tries to serve several formats at once.

How it compares and where it sits

The Android video editor category splits roughly into two camps: timeline editors that give you control and expect you to use it, and template-driven apps that trade control for speed. inMelo sits firmly in the second camp. Its strong average across a large rating base, with millions of installs, suggests that trade-off lands well with a large audience.

The comparison I would draw is with a dedicated music or slideshow app rather than with a full editing suite. Those tools tend to do one thing narrowly; inMelo covers templates, effects, audio, text and slideshows in a single place, which is convenient if you would rather not juggle several apps for one post. The cost of that convenience is the constraint of the template.

The cartoon generator and body effects are the pieces that give it a distinctive edge over a plain slideshow maker, since they produce a look you would otherwise need separate tools to achieve. Whether that matters depends entirely on the style of video you make. For bright, rhythmic, effect-heavy social content it is a real advantage; for anything restrained, it is beside the point.

A fast route to beat-synced social video

inMelo is worth installing if you make short vertical video for social platforms and want the music and the cuts to feel connected without doing that work manually. The template library, the beat-timed transitions and the AI cartoon effects cover the ground that Reels, Shorts and lyric videos actually need, and the app is free to try with ads and in-app purchases present. The strong average from a large rating base is a reasonable signal that the formula works for the people using it.

It suits beginners and casual creators most: anyone who wants a finished-looking video from photos and clips they already own, in a sitting rather than an evening. It also suits people who post often and need a repeatable process more than they need fine control. If you already work in a timeline editor and care about frame-level decisions, the template model will feel like a cage rather than a shortcut.

My advice is to start with one of the free Reels templates and a track you like, and judge the result on whether it looks like something you would actually post. If it does, the rest of the library and the effect set are worth exploring. If you find yourself fighting the template, that is the clearest sign the app's approach and your approach do not match.

What's new in version 2.040.174

inMelo version 2.040.174 is officially released! In this update, we have fixed some minor bugs and optimized details to improve the user experience. Hope you enjoy all the features we've added. Please don't hesitate to ask for help, tutorials, and new features at [email protected], see you in the next update!