For many reasons, I’ve been interested in video editing and making movies for years; nothing professional, I just thought it was kind of neat to be able to put together movies. Over 20 years ago, I put together footage that I had taken at the 1989 National Scout Jamboree and put together a little video that I edited using our camcorder and a VCR. I may have even put in some titling using a computer, but I can’t recall. That was quite rudimentary compared to what can be done today.
When Apple first introduced iMovie for the Mac, I thought it was quite neat and made a few videos, but the more video I took and stored, the more time consuming it became to edit the videos. Since then, I’ve made a few movies, but have mostly left that to my mother as she seems to like doing it and does a great job throwing together random clips and photos to make something interesting.
At the iPad 2 introduction, Apple showed iMovie for iPad. The ease of use looked amazing and getting it was one of my many reasons for buying an iPad 2. After I got my iPad 2 the other day, the first app I bought was iMovie. My intention was to make a movie from videos and photos that we shot in the last year of our son. While I was hopeful that I could accomplish that this weekend, I was also realistic that based on my past history, this might have been a pipe dream.
The first step in creating a movie was to make sure all my video was in the proper format for the iPad. I already wrote about transcoding all my video the other day, so that part was accomplished. I decided to see how far I could get this weekend. In about the 1 hour or so that I could use my iPad, I managed to apply all the video I wanted to the timeline and trimmed it. I then spent maybe another hour adding photos and dropping in some songs.
I was absolutely amazed that within about 2 hours, I was able to create a 9 minute movie ready to show. In the past, the movies I’ve made have taken me a long time on the order of 1 hour per 1 minute of final movie which really makes the process a drag. I’m now cautiously optimistic that I can keep up the movie making if it is this easy to make something half decent.
I did encounter a few issues with iMovie including crash or two. iMovie applies the Ken Burns effect to every photo added, something that I find pretty annoying. In order to remove this, you have to set the starting and ending zoom level and picture position to be the same. This is fine as long as you zoom out on every picture and align the picture to an edge; however, if you want to zoom in or center the photo, this process is extremely hard to do. I’ve submitted feedback to Apple to improve this.
iMovie on the iPad is intuitive in many ways, but I read through the in-app help which reduced some of my frustration (removing the Ken Burns effect is documented). I’d strongly recommend that people read the docs before starting a project as some actions are strange at first.
iMovie for iPad is almost a killer reason to buy an iPad 2 (it won’t run on a first generation iPad). However, if your video isn’t in a format that the iPad can show, you have to go through the long and tedious process of converting it; if you’re also shopping for a new digital camera, I’d suggest looking for one that encodes video in a format that the iPad can show natively (also useful to import video when you’re away from your computer). So far, my brief research shows that the Panasonic compact digital cameras use M-JPEG which the iPad should be able to read.
Pros
- Intuitive interface for most editing needs.
- Extremely fast method for creating movies.
- Decent results with little effort.
Cons
- Removing Ken Burns effect is a pain when adding photos.
- No ability to lower volume of music in particular parts of a clip, i.e. no fine grained audio editing. iMovie will “duck” the audio in the background music if there is music in a clip.
- It can be slow at times where the interface appears to be unresponsive.
- Occasional crashes.
Summary
If you have an iPad 2, spend the $4.99 and buy iMovie. Even if you don’t make a lot of movies, just playing with it is worth it to see what the iPad 2 can do. This could be the way to edit movies at the end of a trip even before you get home as it is easy to put off the movie making and simply never get around to it.
iMovie is an impressive piece of software and I hope that Apple keeps making minor improvements to touch up the edges.