Review - iMovie for iPhone

Anthony Caruana
Wednesday, 04 August 2010 17:34

Your IT - Mobility

There was a time when creating movies required a super-computer, a degree from Film-Maker School and lots of expensive equipment. But iMovie for iPhone - a cutback version of Apple’s desktop application - puts movie editing and distribution in the palm of your hand. We took iMovie for iPhone on the road to put it through its paces.

iMovie used to be a very powerful non-linear editor, pitched at the consumer. I say used to be as a couple of versions ago, Apple chucked away what had been a great product and replaced it with one that was so dumbed down that the Apple fan-boys complained and forced Apple to put the old version back online as a free download to their new iMovie customers.

A subsequent release fixed many of the issues introduced but we’re now able to see some of the method behind that madness. iMovie for iPhone looks a lot like its desktop counterpart.

iMovie for iPhone can be used to produce short movies that combine a number of separate clips. It could be used to put together longer, more complex movies but it does have some limitations. For example, it can only use a couple of different transitions and you can’t do any editing of the soundtrack - you can either use a track from your music library of the original sound from the recording.

We recorded a couple of clips using the iPhone 4’s camera. We then launched iMovie and started by choosing from one of the five available themes; Modern, Bright, Travel, Playful and News. Each theme comes with its own transitions and theme music. The theme music is handy if you don;t have a suitable track in your library.

In order to add movies and photos to your project you’ll need to enable Location Services for iMovie (from Settings | General | Location Services) or it won’t be able to use photos and video clips you have locally stored on your iPhone.