Your route draws itself: the new VéloCore story composer

You get home from a ride. You are pleased with yourself. And all you have to show for it is a blurry screenshot of your app. The new VéloCore story composer fixes that: it turns a recorded ride into a real vertical video, where the route draws itself across the map while the counters climb along with it. Nothing to film, nothing to edit.

The route clip, or how to tell a ride in fifteen seconds

This is the feature that does the heavy lifting. You pick a ride, drop its map onto the page, and VéloCore builds a vertical MP4 at 1080 × 1920, 30 frames per second. The route unrolls over a real map background, from the green start dot to the glowing head leading the way, and every number climbs in step with the route rather than appearing all at once.

The important part: no source footage is needed. Everything is generated from your data. You filmed nothing during the ride? The clip exists anyway.

Duration has four settings, from Fast to Very slow (5, 10, 15 or 20 seconds per page). Since the drawing always takes up the same share of the page, setting the duration really means setting the speed at which your route appears. A 15 km loop in 5 seconds feels snappy; a long sportive over 20 seconds gets room to breathe.

A real composer, not three fixed templates

Behind the clip sits a full editor. You stack whatever you like, across as many pages as you like:

• Text: five type families, colour, alignment, block, rounded or highlighted background, shadow and outline
• Your photos, as a hand-cropped page background or as a draggable inset
• The route map, in four styles including the dynamic trace with halo and glowing head
• Your statistics, on a dark card, a light card, or no card at all
• Freehand drawing with a pen, marker or neon brush, in vector strokes you can still move afterwards
• Stickers: around a hundred emoji sorted by theme, plus a dozen VéloCore marks
• Along with mentions, links and locations

Everything is handled with your fingers: a single gesture moves, resizes and rotates at the same time, with magnetic snapping that lines things up cleanly on centres and edges. Each element gets its own contextual bar: delete, duplicate, bring forward, send backward.

Undo. Really, all of it.

This is the detail that makes or breaks an editor. Every action goes through a history, so Undo and Redo catch absolutely everything, including a page background changed by mistake. And a whole drag counts as a single undo: no tapping forty times to walk back one movement. Drafts are saved as you go, even if the app is closed in between.

Your numbers, never invented

Twenty-two ride figures can be placed on the page: distance, duration, moving time, average and maximum speed, elevation gain and loss, maximum altitude, calories, average, maximum and normalised power, heart rate, cadence, the bike you rode, the date, the weather, the route name.

With one strict rule, written into the code rather than into a marketing promise: you are only offered what was actually measured. No power meter that day? The figure never shows up in the catalogue. Better still, the catalogue displays your real value, "68.4 km" rather than an empty label, so you see what you are placing before you place it.

Three ways to start

Start from a blank page if you already know what you want. Otherwise start from a photo, or from a ride: the app opens the list of your saved rides and you pick one. From that same list, a single tap can drop the dynamic trace straight onto the page.

On Android, four layouts are also generated automatically from your latest ride, named The number, The route, The performance and The logbook. Here too, nothing is invented: if a figure is missing it is removed and the layout tightens up. Everything stays editable afterwards.

So where does it go?

A story is published to the VéloCore feed and stays up for 24 hours, exactly as before. The video clip is exported as an MP4 and lands in your phone's share sheet: social networks, messaging, whatever you want. On Android you can also post it to your wall or save it straight to your gallery, in a VéloCore folder.

No subscription

The composer and the route clips are not behind the Premium subscription. They are part of the app, on Android and on iPhone. All you need is a recorded ride, which is convenient: that is VéloCore's day job, with screen-off GPS and barometric elevation. Full details on the features page, and your rides are waiting in your space.

Read next: Spots, Stories and route sharing · VéloCore is on iPhone