Vine v Instagram - the summary

Which is best?

Movie magic can be yours.With Vine’s 6.5 seconds looped footage and Instagram’s 13.5 seconds straight i.e. not looped footage.Which is best, though?

Both film off your phone. Both can start-stop. The critical differences for users are that

(1) Artistic: Vine is looped and shorter while Instagram can have effects added to make it look better. Artistically, both appeal but in different ways: the stop motion possibilities with looped Vine are great while Instagram’s “look good” screen effects are good, too.

(2) Sharing: Vine can be shared to Twitter and Facebook. Instagram can be shared to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

Both can engage users through commenting and liking.

Vine can be embedded, Instagram cannot.

They seem pretty similar, right?

Wrong. The difference in the length and looping ability makes a critical artistic difference. What you can do with Vine’s stop motion on a loop takes the user into an artistic arena quite different to what you can do with Instagram’s simple start-stop reel. A looped film opens up all kinds of interesting things like patterns, words, images - all of which can be used to create imaginative and enticing films with messages; challenges even - a potentially powerful tool. This has a different audience to the ‘extended’ image which is how I see Instagram film.Instagram is often associated with nostalgia rather than artistic endeavour.

As regards the sharing and embedding: to be able to embed a Vine means you can place it literally anywhere. But you can’t drop it onto Tumblr and Tumblr.’s audience is likely to be receptive towards Instagram films. And of course it is beautifully easy to share from Tumblr. to Pinterest.

So you see both Vine and Instagram films are useful and necessary even though they initially seem alike. St Pauls Lifestyle is embracing both - they do different things and go to different places, bringing movie magic wherever they go. :)