X Factor iPhone 4: Video & Editing
Study of Artist Robert Williams from Christine Morris on Vimeo.
This is a video of the amazing study of artist Robert Williams. As a spur of the moment exercise I wanted to out together a little video using just the iPhone 4. It was filmed and edited with the iMove app.
I was visiting with friends over the weekend and when I had a look at the study I was amazed, mesmerised even. I had to take a photo. Then I remembered – I have an iPhone 4, and aparently it shoots good video. So I took out my phone and thought I’d give it a try.
I took one video over the course of a few seconds and then thought how would I actually upload this somewhere? So I went looking through the apps I had and saw Ustream. I didn’t have an account properly set up and it wasn’t letting me modify my existing one on the fly so I had to wait until we came back.
The iMove interface where you can get started making your masterpiece!
At home I thought that actually it would be a perfect chance to take iMovie for iPhone for a test drive.
I’m not an iMovie fan on the mac only because I use Final Cut Pro and it’s really hard to use an app like iMovie once you’ve had all the features you could dream of, but I appreciate it a good starter piece of software. I got the iMovie app for the iPhone and it was a bit confusing initially, so it’s a good idea to just play around with it. After a 30 minute or so play with the features and how it works, you really can get on and make a mini movie.
Choosing Video to import into iMovie.
I made the clip with a few titles and transitions, used the music provided in the app (they have a news theme a happy theme and so on…) in order that it is completely made solely with the iPhone. I then decided to upload it as it was…
Once I had sorted UStream, I logged into the app and went thorough the process to upload a video. It was easy to use and straight forward so it only took a minute or so. When I had a look though, UStream really compressed it a lot. The whole point of this video was to showcase a bit of the amazing quality the phone is capable of, and at that quality it was no where near impressive.
Importing Clips, Images or Music into iMovie.
I had to delete that video and think of another way. I thought YouTube would be a better option. You only need to click on your exported movie in Photos and then there is an option to upload to YouTube. Again it was really quick and easy to do, you can enter in Tags, description, titles etc, but that too had poor quality once it was up. (Note: There is an upload to MobileMe option which I haven’t tried but that might keep better quality.)
Export Options within iMove
I decided to attach the phone to the mac and just import it into iPhoto and access it as a movie file. That way I could just log into YouTube on the computer and access it that way – at the quality that I wanted. You can export your movie within the iMovie app at 360p, 540p or HD 720p and HD was what I chose.
Although in the end I had to copy across the film and then upload it from my computer, it was only because I really was after that HD quality to illustrate how good this little device is. If you are just shooting and uploading then you could try something like Youtube from the phone, TwitVide, Posterous, etc… and if folks are only watching it on their mobile devices they won’t notice the quality too much.
This really is an amazing feat, not only did I manage to shoot and edit on a single device, but it was actually fun and pretty straight forward!
2 comments
Ya the compression is really disappointing. As it is I will leave it until I get home and then transfer my video across.
I pulled it off UStream because of the quality, theirs was the worst. Gone with Vimeo and I think I will use that in future.
Watched your movie yesterday yesterday when you tweeted it, though it seems ustream don’t do html5 yet (shame on them!)
I don’t understand why apple won’t allow a wifi only hd upload of video.
Can’t wait for payday going to buying iMovie amongst a bunch o other apps I’ve been waiting for