MacMost Now 419: iMovie for iPhone 4

Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now and today's episode let's look at iMovie for the iPhone.

So the iMovie app is built specifically for the iPhone 4 and it doesn't work on earlier version. It cost $5.00 and you can get it in the iTunes app store. Let's take a look at how it works.

So when you first run iMovie it'll ask you to start a new project. Press the plus button to do that then you get to select the theme. So there are five different themes to choose from. Now, the theme will determines several things about the movie including the type of transition to be used and a few other bells and whistles and there's also some theme music, default music for each theme you can use it if you want to. 

Let's select the first theme, the modern theme there. Now you basically have four buttons controls everything. This one goes back to the list of projects. This will play the current movie. This is add media. Let's press that and it will show you all the videos that are on your iPhone and these have few videos that you took with your iPhone. So let's choose one here. ...you can't choose video that you imported under your iPhone. 

 Now, you got a timeline here at the bottom that you can scroll back and forth on and then you see the preview there. ...a second piece of media, that one. So first let's play with your transition. You can tap on your transition here and it will give you some information about it, it's a one second transition and we can double tap on it and it will give us the option to do a cross dissolve which is always there. 

The theme to transition which depends on the type of theme you're using or no transition at all. Now you can trim any of these clips by simply selecting in here on the timeline and then dragging one of these points and will shrink it. So let's create a really small movie by dragging these there and you can see the time it gives you right there. Now in addition to importing media from on your phone you could also use this button here and it will bring up the camera and allow you to record a new video and added directly to the project. 

You can also choose to add photos and audio. The same way you add video you just select along the bottom here and choose any photo including photos you've imported from iPhoto and you can choose audio and it will put the music behind your video and then throw it back there. Now what you can't do in iMovie for the iPhone is add multiple tracks of audio and specify where they are. You can only have this one track and it goes behind the entire video. 

 So the playback what we have press the play button enable go from the current time here or at the end of the video. Now you can add titling as well. So just double tap on the clip and you can look at the clip settings and you can set the title style. You set it to none, opening middle or, ending. Now opening and ending they can only appear at either end of the clip, the middle will appear throughout the entire thing so it's basically all over. Third something on the left there and all over third again but just at the end. 

So for instance the opening here I could pop it over there, I can double tap on it and I could say put a title in there. Tap done and now I can see it here on the preview how it appears there and it only appears at the beginning. I think you can see that was the transition for the modern theme there and if I change the theme by tapping on the gear button there to something else like let's say the news theme I got a couple special things. 

First is that opening sequence that opening title now actually shows the location of the video in those from the GPS information taken from the iPhone that the video was shot in Denver and I actually pinpoint it on the map as well and put the title that I want and it also knows the transition is changed as well. So we play back to where we get just by changing the theme. 

And here's if I change it to the travel theme and you see installed has a map there and in a different transition. Going back to the clip information you can see I can change the location there if I need to I can also change the title style there and I can turn the audio on and off before the clip if I just want to silence it and just have the music go through. 

So when you're done you go back to the list of projects which you can swipe back and forth between if you have more than one and you can use the export button there and export it either in medium, large or HD format. So let's print and choose HD and will export the movie and there we go. From this screen you can also preview the movie full screen like that. So once the movie is exported in your camera roll you can go to the camera roll and of course use the functions there to email, send it by text message, MobileMe or your YouTube account. 

 If you sync your iPhone with iTunes it'll of course come into your iPhoto collection as well and you can do which one with it from there. So the iMovie app is a lot of fun to play with but you play with more than a toy. I don't see why anybody wouldn't just wait til they got home and then edit the movie in iMovie on their Mac which is far more capable and you can do a lot more with it and create videos that are truly unique. Here you're basically restricted to one of the five themes and now your movie is gonna look like everybody else's movies that are made on the app.

I don't understand why they don't let you mix transitions from between the themes or choose from a longer list and I don't understand why you can't bring in video from iTunes which is properly formatted. I mean doing so means that you can't use custom titles say if you're building a podcast or something like that. Even if you're just using this casually just to make a quick video of your family vacation I don't see why you wouldn't go and use iMovie on your Mac to make a better one.

But looking at the big picture this is the first serious video editing app on a device like the iPhone. So it is just the first step hopefully future versions of this and maybe some third party applications will have even more advanced editing techniques and pretty soon will have free full featured editing apps on these mobile devices. Hope you like this looked at iMovie for the iPhone until next time. This is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.