With advances in smartphone technology, you can now use devices like the iPhone 4S to create and share your own movies. iMovie is an application available on the AppStore that allows users to take existing video footage and turn it into professional-looking movies. In this article, I will discuss some of the main features of this app and how to use it.
iMovie lets you take existing video footage that you’ve captured with the iPhone 4S’s built-in 8-megapixel camera and edit it to create great-looking movies. When you have some pre-recorded footage, just open the iMovie app and select the video you want to edit. Once you’ve done this, the first thing you’ll need to do is trim the footage you don’t want to include, using the slider interface to precisely cut out the unwanted footage from the video. Then you will keep the best parts. You can further chop this up into sections which can then be rearranged to change the order, again using the slider, and then drag and drop the video sections into the desired order.
Once that’s done, you can edit the remaining footage by adding effects like slow motion or freeze frames, and even add additional still images from your photo library. You can add a sound track using the phone’s built-in iPod music feature, or choose from a number of sound effects.
Text can be added using the on-screen Qwerty keyboard, which allows users to include credits and subtitles, giving it a professional look. There are eight preloaded themes that let you give your video a specific look, with a new one called CNN iReport, which gives your video the look of a news report, doing most of the hard work for you. Simply fill in the blanks when prompted, as text, and this will scroll across the bottom like headlines in a news report.
When you’ve finished creating your masterpiece, you can share it on a social networking site like Facebook with just a touch of the screen, for all your friends and family to see. Plus, you can choose to stream it wirelessly to a compatible TV to show it to a group of people so they don’t have to huddle around the phone. Thanks to the iCloud function of the iPhone 4S, it can also be saved wirelessly and sent to other Apple devices such as iPad 2 or iMac.
The functionality and versatility of the iMovie app means you can use it for fun, creating a movie of your last vacation or day off, or school and college projects. With enough practice and patience, the results can be fantastic and as good as anything produced on a computer. Apps like iMovie show how the iPhone franchise gets better and better. iMovie can be downloaded almost instantly over a 3G or Wi-Fi connection for just £2.99, which I think is excellent value for money given the potential of the app.
