By and large I love the iWork and iLife apps for iOS, but… But iMovie confounded me at first (and still confuses me at times). Sometimes I’m not quite sure if it’s as easy as iMovie on the Mac or maybe it’s easier. One thing that is for sure once you get the hang of iMovie for iOS, it’s a great video editor for quick and dirty videos on the go. As powerful as iMovie on the Mac? Nope, but sometimes that’s okay. In this video demo I give you a few tips and hints for using iMovie for iOS
Much like GarageBand for iOS, iMovie for iOS is pretty powerful as tablet apps go (funny that Apple hasn’t updated iMovie or iPhoto to really take advantage of the A6X chip yet), but both are really intended as “lite” versions of their desktop counterparts. If you start with that idea at the beginning of a project you’ll be a lot less frustrated as you go along.
This video goes through a few of the basics of iMovie like pulling in a clip, making easy edits, adding a photo, and adding music to a clip. In the video I demo a “basic project” not making a trailer. Trailers are very cool, but also require more shots to pull together for a demo.
When making the video (after a few minutes refreshing my memory with all the features), I forgot to include how you add titles and text to clips. The rest of the take was awesome, so here is how that feature works.
Double tap on a clip and you will see menu pop up. Tap “Title Style” and you’ll see something like this:
How it looks in the clip depends on what project template you’ve picked. Also, how long the title stays isn’t adjustable (as it would be in the desktop version). Nor can you change the font or remove the location information (entirely) from the screen.
Changing the transitions works in a similar way. double-tap to choose none, cross-disolve, or Theme. You can change the duration of the transition, but you are limited to those three options.
What does this all add up to?
At its core, iMovie is a great, relatively easy, and powerful video editor for iOS. However, to get the most out of iMovie you need to understand what it is good at doing and and what it just can’t do at all.
If you want to do rough edits of a video and then pass the project to iMovie on the desktop, you can have the best of both worlds and probably save yourself a lot of frustration in the process.
Download link:
➤ iMovie for iOS ($5)
