iMovie

I’ve used iMovie multiple times for various videos and I’ve found that it works best as a tool to put together clips in a string, and that’s about it. I am a big fan of the application, it’s easy to use, doesn’t glitch, and exports quickly to your Camera Roll. It’s incredibly easy to get off of your iPhone when linked to your computer and simple enough to upload to whichever video site you want.

The issue is you can’t do voiceovers like a conventional news story because there’s no multitrack editing. You would need to time your clips and voiceover separately, which would really defeat the purpose of mobile journalism. So if you are doing breaking news and film a standup of yourself at the site and then edit different b-roll with an interview clip, that would be your story. No voiceovers, trust me. You can’t actually control the volume of the sound, which can get unfortunate if your video was taken from too far away and without a stick mic.

In actuality the application is ideal for putting together short movies. For people that like to put together little films of their day, or of an event, this is a great tool. You have the ability to add music from your iTunes or choose from theme music the application provides. You can’t control the sound once you put it in, so if you want to make a movie that has different songs you need to edit that music on a different application and send it to your iPhone’s iTunes. It’s simple to add the clips directly from your camera roll, to add supers and to cut or shorten the clips. The supers/titles only come in a minimal number of themes, and you can’t use too many words. You can also add a transition between clips.

I’ve edited videos while watching TV on this program because it’s so easy. Just don’t expect to have the highest professional quality because of the aspects of your video you can’t control. It is possible to come out with a pretty polished looking clip though depending on the video you gather and how you piece together your raw footage.