As promised during the recent Apple developer conference in San Francisco, the mobile version of Apple’s iMovie software is now available for download from the iTunes App Store. iMovie, which works only with the new iPhone 4 (also publicly available as of today), lets you create HD movies using video-editing controls and features similar to those found in the iMovie desktop software for Mac.
According to the app’s description, iMovie for iPhone includes specific features for multi-touch, like the ability to tap to add or record video, drag to trim lengths of video clips or photos, pinch to zoom the timeline and slide to scrub through the video in your iMovie project.
First Impressions
The app also comes with a variety of themes (Modern, Bright, Playful, Travel and News) which each offer their own set of titles, transitions and soundtrack. And you can further customize your iMovie with songs from your iTunes library or photos from your iPhone. All of these elements can be changed at any time, allowing you to experiment with different styles. Just don’t try to double-tap on the music file portion of the movie to see the option to change your soundtrack. Although you can drag the music out of the movie’s interface where it vanishes with a cloud-shaped icon that disappears in a “poof” animation, you can’t hop into music settings from the same area. Instead, you have to return to the “add media” section to customize the audio tracks.
When you’ve finished creating the movie, it can be exported to one of three sizes: Medium (360p), Large (480p) or HD (720p) and can then be shared via Apple’s MobileMe service, YouTube, email or MMS. Sadly, there appears to be no “export to Facebook” option. However, it should be noted that this “sharing” feature is actually a two-step process. First the movie is exported to your iPhone’s Camera Roll and from there, you can you choose to share it using the Camera Roll’s default sharing mechanisms. Social sharing is not actually built into the iMovie app itself.
In our brief tests, the one complaint we had was with the rather tedious method of having to select photos one-by-one. If you have a lot of photos you want to turn into a movie-like slideshow or add alongside your video clips, this process quickly becomes tiring. When emailing photos directly from the phone’s photo gallery, multi-select is available, so why not in iMovie? Other than that, the process of creating a movie from your own media is incredibly simple, so much so in fact, that novice movie-makers probably won’t even be too bothered by the lack of a detailed tutorial, another missing feature in the application, but one that’s definitely not “missed.”
iMovie is a $4.99 download and is available from the iTunes store here.
