Filed under: Video, How-tos, iPhone, iPhone 101
How to make iPhone videos sparkle with iMovie
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?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.
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.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Rico said 10:10PM on 6-28-2009
Couldn't you use Image Capture to transfer the video from the iPhone?
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Marty Bushway said 10:54PM on 6-28-2009
Yep. Image Capture is a great tool for this. Import it to the desktop, import into iMovie and delete original from desktop. This way, It's not cluttering up my iPhoto with video files and keeping videos where they belong: in the movies folder.
Mystic said 11:00PM on 6-28-2009
Horrible advice Marty. You WANT to import you videos into iPhoto. Save your 'movies' folder for the iMovie save file and/or final video.
VL-Tone said 11:03PM on 6-28-2009
I can't believe that after two articles about making iPhone videos, Steven haven't mentioned using Image Capture (which comes with every Mac) to retrieve the raw .h264 movie files.
The iPhone appears just like a standard digital camera device to the OS, and standard tools like Image Capture (and other programs on Windows) can be used to retrieve raw media.
Please Steven update your article accordingly, because recompressing and emailing videos is really not the way to do it...
Marty said 11:10PM on 6-28-2009
I like the Media Browser as much as the next guy but when I'm doing a dedicated iPhoto backup, I don't really want it to be bogged down with video clips.
It's the same reason why when importing video from my camcorder I don't put it into iPhoto: It's not a picture. iMovie allows you to organize video events and projects.
Andre said 10:10PM on 6-28-2009
I believe if you email the video to yourself, the iPhone compresses it further. The best way to transfer is using iPhoto, and you'll get the original quality.
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Brian Allen said 10:28AM on 6-29-2009
Email compresses the heck out of the video.
DevilGhost said 11:09AM on 6-29-2009
i agree
just sync it with iPhoto, open up iMovie and it recognizes that there is a movie to port over.
Camperton said 3:15PM on 6-29-2009
The fact that that they recommend you email the videos to yourself is laughable and kinda sad.
Josh said 10:21PM on 6-28-2009
I'm pretty sure I just used Image Capture to pull the video from the iPhone. This would be much better than compressing it for email.
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Zachary Waldowski said 10:45PM on 6-28-2009
Even better than iPhoto, why not just... plug it in? Movies and pics are placed in DCIM, and your iPhone appears as a video-capable still camera in OS X, Windows, and Linux.
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Todd said 11:26PM on 6-28-2009
Transferring wirelessly (which I think is the thrust of Steve's suggestion to use email) can make sense if you want to offload files from the phone for storage before you're done shooting. I don't like sacrificing any quality if I can, so I'd only use the email path in a pinch, but it's good to know about for the times when you can't or don't want to connect to offload video.
Bucky said 11:55AM on 6-29-2009
This doesn't appear to work with the 3GS. It's not being recognized on my Mac as a movie camera.
mungler said 11:07PM on 6-28-2009
Did you stabilise the video in iMovie?
If not, dognabit, why not?! ;)
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Reverend Shank said 11:07PM on 6-28-2009
This is probably one of the most convoluted tutorials ever, very unMaclike.
Better: Import w/ iPhoto, edit, YouTube, done.
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Eric H. said 11:42PM on 6-28-2009
This is the second article in which you give bad information about getting the movies onto your computer. If you send through email it severely compresses the movie and resizes it to 480x360. Bring the movies from the phone to the mac by image capture or iPhoto. I think you should edit the article so readers are getting the best quality videos possible.
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gtdavemac said 12:55AM on 6-29-2009
Why make this so hard? I guess my comment in the last thread wasn't one of the ones you liked...
1. Import your photos/videos into iPhoto as designed. If you don't like your iPhone videos in iPhoto, then that's up to you. Perhaps Apple will change the functionality, but right now this is how it's designed. I almost prefer it, since none of these videos are the same quality as your average camcorder.
2. Open iMovie. In the Event Browser in the lower left there's an iPhoto Videos section that brings up all your clips chronogically.
3. Select and use clips. No importing necessary.
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Gary said 8:30AM on 6-29-2009
Yeap I agree, the iphoto to imovie way is the best. Just a natural transition. Why make it difficult?
@maczter said 1:25AM on 6-29-2009
iMovie scans your iPhoto library each time it's opened. If you let iPhoto import the movie when it imports your still photos, as it should do by default anyhow, you can then fire up iMovie and find it there in the "iPhoto Videos" view in the Event Library, waiting for you to edit.
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Brian Arnold said 10:40AM on 6-29-2009
As an addendum to this comment - iMovie does scan iPhoto for videos, but only at initial load. Even if you change events and then change back, it doesn't re-scan.
So, make sure you've done the import into iPhoto before you go firing up iMovie - or if you already have iMovie up, just restart it and it'll find it. It'll also prompt to create thumbnails. If you hit Later, you won't be able to access the video, so, do it then.
I hadn't thought about Image Capture, and I may have to take that approach from here out, but I currently use iPhoto to iMovie frequently, and have done so a few times already with the 3GS.