After initially resisting and worrying about antenna gate and spending the money I finally upgraded to the iPhone 4. Even before I got my free case from Apple I didn’t have a dropped call so I am not sure what the fuss was about, but that is for another blog post.
One of the first things I did when I upgraded the phone was to download iMovie for iPhone. (All these “i”s are making me feel narcissistic.) At first I thought I might be wasting five dollars on an app I wouldn’t use that much and was more curious about than anything. I also was also concerned it I might get easily frustrated considering I am used to cutting pieces with Final Cut Pro and I have not been a fan of the “upgrades” that Apple made to iMovie when they switched from a pure timeline to a project-based user experience. Again, a topic for a different post.
Anyway, I have been playing around with it and it certainly has the feel of inaugural version of an app, but there’s potential there as well. It is really stripped down as to avoid app bloat, it weighs in at 35.2MB, which is pretty amazing for a video editing app. By stripping it down so far it also only allows for some basic transitions and edits. For example to fade in from or out to black you would need to create a clip of black or a black photo and save it in your photo roll. Once you use a clip don’t move it from your phone or you’ll be forced to re-cut and re-insert into your timeline. Your transitions are limited to three options, straight-cut, crossfade and a theme-based transition from one of Apple’s five designs.
Some of the niceties of the app are the ability to add any song from your iPhone’s music library, being able to turn on and off the audio for a specific clip, making a slice on a clip with your finger and some of the automated-audio capabilities. When you add music to the timeline and drop a clip with audio enabled over it, the music automatically ducks placing importance on the clip’s audio. The app also clips the music at the end of your video timeline so you are not left with two-minutes of blank video over whatever song you have chosen. Another interesting feature is the running time that is displayed after the last clip in the timeline letting you know how long your current video is.
There are some things missing or at least if they are there I have not found them yet. Things like the ability to name individual projects, or reconnect to moved or missing video clips, fading in from or out to black, a few more video transitions would be nice and certainly fading audio in and out.
On the export the addition of social media services certainly would be welcome, right now you have the option of a few different video sizes and that is about it.
All-in-all I think it is a great start to what has the potential to be an on-the-fly editing package. For anyone wanting to jump in to editing on a phone you may want to wait for this app to mature a little more.
Below is an example of a video I cut using iMovie for iPhone.
Give Me a Little Skate from Spike Parker on Vimeo.
