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How to make iPhone videos sparkle with iMovie

by Steven Sande Jun 28th 2009 at 10:00PM

If you read my recent post about taking movies with the iPhone 3GS, you probably noted that I talked about the lack of editing capabilities on the iPhone with the exception of trimming the beginning and ending of your videos. What if you want to edit your movies, add titles or effects, or combine a bunch of short iPhone video clips?

Several of the comments left by TUAW readers asked the same question, and it's so easy to do that I decided to whip up a quick tutorial showing how this works. You probably have a tool on your Mac that can do the job for you with just a few clicks, drags, and menu selections. iMovie is the perfect easy tool for creating full feature films (just kidding) from individual scenes shot with the iPhone 3GS video camera. Here's how to do it.
1) Email your iPhone movies to the computer that you'll be doing your editing on. Until Apple or a third-party developer determines a great way to copy video files directly from an iPhone to a Mac using Wi-Fi, this is the easiest way to copy these files. Instructions on how to email iPhone video can be found in my first post in the section titled "Sharing your video".

2) Launch iMovie on your Mac. I'm using iMovie '09, part of Apple's iLife '09 suite. You can probably do the same things I'm going to describe here with earlier versions of iMovie, or even with similar applications such as Windows Movie Maker on PCs. However, I like the changes that have been made to iMovie '09 that add better titling, special effects, and shake reduction.

3) In iMovie '09, select File > Import > Movies... Choose the hard disk where you wish to save the movie, select Create New Event (or if you're adding more video clips to an existing event, select Add to Existing Event), select the .mov file you wish to import, optimize your video file as "Large", select Copy files (this keeps your original copy intact), and then click Import. The screenshot below demonstrates the user interface for this process in iMovie '09. Since iPhone video files are usually fairly small and short, the import process is normally quite fast.


4) Now that the video has been imported, you can begin to play with it. To start off, you'll need to create a new project in iMovie '09 (see below). You can choose one of the built-in themes to make your video even more professional looking.

In the example movie embedded below, I started off by creating a title, then transitioned into my video, added a nonsense subtitle or two, and then went to the final scrolling credits. I also dragged in some music from the jingles in iLife '09 to give the video some spice, and then exported the whole shebang to YouTube. I won't go through the steps on how to do all of this; for more information on how to use iMovie '09, check out Apple's excellent video tutorials.

Update: A number of readers took issue with my suggestion that you email the video, since the iPhone does a lot of compression before sending. Instead, you may wish to use the following method:
1) Connect your iPhone to your Mac using the standard USB connection.
2) If iPhoto is set up to launch automatically upon the connection of a camera, it will open; if not, launch iPhoto.
3) Import the photos from the iPhone into iPhoto. One or more of these "photos" will actually be the .mov video files created by the iPhone.
4) Drag the movie(s) from iPhoto over to iMovie to import them into iMovie, then start your editing.

To see how the raw video featured in the original post looks after 15 minutes of cheesy editing, click the play button below.


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If you read my recent post about taking movies with the iPhone 3GS, you probably noted that I talked about the lack of editing capabilities...
 

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35 Comments

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stefan

All the movies imported as widescreen by default,
but many of mine were shot as tallscreen. all my tallscreen movies were flipped sideways in imovie, though they are not treated that way in iphoto or quicktime.. any way to avoid that?

August 15 2009 at 10:29 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
MrRentyro

I have never been one for making videos, let alone taking pictures. But when I got my new iPhone 3GS and iMac I found that putting together a short video was not only easy with surprising results, but a lot of fun too. Here's an example of what I came up with from the Tour de France this summer. There was more than enough memory to spare on my phone and the editing process took about 3 hours. Bear in mind that this was only the second video I ever made. Apple sure make products that flatter its users.
Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8PCADMblxg

August 05 2009 at 2:35 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mariagrafs

Movie capture is the best thing one can do with iphone

July 03 2009 at 2:44 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris R

When I import video from iPhone into iMovie, the clips that are shot in "portrait", i.e., with iPhone held vertically, are stretched on the screen. An aspect ratio issue. Clips that are shot holding the iPhone horizontally appear normal. According to the Apple website, you are supposed to be able to shoot either way.

Does anyone know how I can render those "portrait" clips so they appear normal in iMovie? (BTW, they appear normal in iPhone or QuickTime playback.)

June 30 2009 at 5:21 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
wynnr

Thanks Steven!
I couldn't have done it without you!

Shot this on Sunday with my iPhone. Pulled the video out of iPhoto. Imported them into iMovie. After a bit of cutting & editing, I uploaded to YouTube!

Voila!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i58H1544l8s

June 30 2009 at 1:31 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
DYLAN UNUTMAZ

uh did you seriously write this not knowing iphoto imports the videos?

June 30 2009 at 1:06 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
jwilliek

on a slight rabbit trail, if you are looking for a way to send a video to facebook, twitter, etc without emailing it, i ran across a review of Pixelpipe [http://tinyurl.com/5rgblf] the other day which seems to do the trick well.

June 29 2009 at 2:58 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
.nate

Why hasn't TUAW/the author amended this article with a response or update yet?

June 29 2009 at 12:53 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ken

Lastly, the title, "How to make iPhone videos sparkle with iMovie", is extremely misleading. The article is a simple nuts and bolts tutorial on getting video into your mac, editing, and posting. It's extremely limited and to use the word 'sparkle' is inappropriate. Why am I wasting my time on this?..and I'm asking myself the same question. It's because sites like this have the reputation of being written by people that know what they're doing, and choose to give good bottom line advice. To see an article that is so poorly researched and written oozes of trying to create something from nothing and not worthy of our time.

June 29 2009 at 8:18 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ken

Also...though I suspect there's a better way to do this, if you'd like to keep your iPhone movies in the iMovie program, I simply downloaded the movies into iPhoto (just because that's what I was prompted to do), and then moved them into iMovie and deleted them from iPhoto. Not a very streamlined process, and I of course hope that Apple makes an easy way to set up a default setting that will import photos into iPhoto, and movies into iMovie.

June 29 2009 at 8:12 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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