Sony’s new Bits update can turn boring game captures into works of art

Sony has released a cool update for its free Share Factory Studio photo and video editing app on PS5 that lets you easily overlay doodles, visual filters, and more onto your saved gameplay captures called Bits. This update is meant to make it easy for beginners to share a video that has some more personality and context. But it seems to go pretty deep, offering a range of customizable effects, including filters, text, sound effects, music, voiceover, doodles, and other visual effects like stickers and camera effects.

Once you save your creation to your console’s storage, you can upload it to Twitter or YouTube straight from the PS5. Or, if you have the PlayStation app on your phone or tablet, these Bits can show up in the Game Captures section. From there, you can download them to share or upload them to the service of your choosing.

Here’s my first creation (warning: Cloud’s got a bit of a potty mouth):

This level of customization, while common on phone and desktop apps, is definitely a rarity on consoles. And it’s leaps above what Microsoft’s Xbox Game DVR currently allows. I typically don’t even bother with Share Factory Studio on PS5. Instead, I just edit the start and end times of my clips in the Media Browser app, then add context with text in a tweet. But Bits on PS5 seem ripe for experimentation, and I look forward to spending even more time with the feature.