Learn How To Edit Video With iMovie For iPhone In 5 Minutes

iMovie is Applke's free tool for combining, trimming, editing and producing video content on your iPhone. This quick tutorial will teach you how to use iMovie's main features in just 5 minutes.
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Watch more videos about related subjects: iMovie (136 videos), iPhone (327 videos).

Video Transcript

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to edit a video on your iPhone using iMovie.
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So if you don't have iMovie you can download it for free from the App Store. Once you have it installed and you launch it you'll be faced with a screen kind of like this where you could create a new project. So let's create a new project. We'll select Movie as the type of project. It's going to prompt us right at the beginning for Media to import. Well, let's skip that for now. I'm not going to select anything and instead Create Movie. Now we have a blank project to start here. So let's tap the Plus button here and we can select videos from various sources. I'm going to select from my Photos Library and then go to All. I have four videos in here right now. Let's select the first one and I could tap the Plus button to add it to the project. 
So now you could see at the bottom here we've got a timeline. I could scroll through it and at the top here we've got a preview area. It shows us exactly the frame we're on indicated by this white line here. Now let's add another video. I'm going to add it to the end so I'm going to move to the white line after the end of this video so then when I tap the Plus button, select another video, tap Add and it will add it to the end. Now one of the first things we want to do is trim these clips. So tap any clip and it's surrounded by a yellow box. You can tap and drag any end to trim it. So you can cut off some from the beginning or some from the end. You can also tap and drag so the white line is at any point that you want. Select the clip and then you could Split to split the clips. When you have multiple clips like this you can tap to select a clip. Then tap and Hold until it pops out like that. Then you could drag it to any point that you want to rearrange the clips. At any time you can use this Undo button here to undo changes. So you can go back to how it was before. 
Now you can also change the transition here. If I Play you can see it's going to be a simple dissolve from one to the other. Now if I want to change that transition just tap it to select and I have several choices. I could have no transitions so a jump cut from one to the other. I could use a Slide or a Wipe and for things like slides and wipes you could tap it multiple times to have the slide or wipe go in different directions. You could also tap a clip and then tap here to add a filter. Let's add the Western filter to this one. You could also add a Title by tapping here and then selecting a title type. Let's add a standard title here. Then you could tap in any part of it and edit the text. Tap Done. You could tap other parts and simple delete them. 
What about sounds. Well, you could have audio just like video. So tap the Plus button here and I'm going to go back up and go to Files instead where I have several pieces of audio here. I've got a sound effect. When I add that you could see it adds it as a separate track here at the bottom. I could tap Hold and then drag it anywhere I want. But what about adding music. Well, if we added something longer, like one of these, it's going to add it as some background audio. You could see that is represented as green. Now I could tap that and I can do some of the same things with it including change the volume. I also have a button here called Fade. I tap that and now I have fade points so I could fade it out there at the end and fade it in here at the beginning. I want to make this a regular piece of sound and not just on the special green background track. I can tap Foreground and it becomes the foreground sound.
Now one last thing I want to show you is using Cutaways. Select a clip that's already there. Then add something new. I'll add this one here. Now instead of using the Plus button I'll tap the three dots here. So let's try just a regular cutaway. You could see it adds it here on top of this video. So the cutaway replaces what's there. You can also trim it on the end there. Now we can switch this to one of the other types of cutaways. I can tap here with it selected and switch it to picture-in-picture. I can then use controls here when it's selected and now I can reposition it or pinch to enlarge it. Then if I use splitscreen you can see it takes that cutaway and and puts it on one side of the screen and I could tap here and you could see it does it vertically rather than horizontally. Now when you're done tap the Done button and it returns to this level. You could Play it. You could also Share it. This is how you Export the video. Now you can use Save Video or Save to Files. If you use Save Video it's going to export to your Photos Library. You could choose from a variety of different formats. If you export using Save to Files it will just save it out as maximum resolution to any folder you want on iCloud Drive or your local files. Then you could Share it from either your Photos Library or from Files to anywhere that you want.

Comments: 3 Comments

    joe juliano
    5 years ago

    Commenting on Learn How To Edit Video With iMovie For iPhone In 5 Minutes. Gary, you moved so fast, I even had the speed at 75%. You are a storehouse of knowledge but for us old dudes the grits don't stick when it moves too quick.
    I think it's very important to have a theme/movie in mind and gather all the pieces in one place to save time.
    In closing I think Learn How To Edit Video With iMovie For iPhone In 5 Minutes is an excellent tutorial, just a bit over my head.

    Carol Orvick Larson
    4 years ago

    That was very fun to watch.Great job Gary!! I have only used iMovie on my computer, but I am excited to use my skills and the help of this tutorial to expedite the process of enjoying my video content
    .

    Barbara Nuss
    4 years ago

    Extremely helpful video. I've been struggling with editing clips in iMovie and watched a number of tutorials, many of which were confusing and incomplete. Yours is absolutely the best. Thank you for sharing.

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