A lot of the buzz for the iPhone 4 centered around iMovie, Apple's new movie-making app for the platform (available as a paid download from the App Store). While it's no replacement for a desktop movie editor, it does offer enough capabilities to make it a serious contender for your on-the-go movie editing choice.
When launching the app for the first time, you're asked to create a new project in one of the five available themes. Each theme comes with default effects, music and fonts, but can be substituted easily, so they don't really matter. Within each project, you can add clips you’ve shot with the iPhone, stills from the Camera Roll and photo library, and unprotected music tracks you’ve synced to the device (only one background music per project). You can't add videos from the iPhone’s iPod library, though.
Basically, all you do is arrange the stills and clips in a timeline interface, apply the music, set effects, create a title and you're done. Doing them is stupidly simple, so anyone should be able to figure it out at first use.
For stills, you can define how long each one stays onscreen (three seconds is the default), but they all come with the Ken Burns pan-and-scan effect (you can tweak the effect to your liking, however, to the point that it's undetectable). You can trim clips (no splitting, though), delete them and even return to the project to adjust the cut. Basically, it can do what you expect from a timeline quite easily, but sticks to simple functions. Overall, the controls feel very natural on a mobile phone - Apple got the UI right.
Once a project is complete, you can export it to H.264 format in one of three settings, either 360p, 540p or 720p. It saves to the Camera Roll, where it can be shared in various ways. Do note that you'll need to dump 720p videos to your computer and share it from there; otherwise, it will get compressed.
The ease by which iMovie lets you edit movies is its core strength. You won't be fashioning anything spectacular from it, but it will do for a mobile solution. In truth, apps like ReelDirector can probably produce better movies, but the iMovie is the simplest we've seen with these kinds of results, so it's impressive in that regard. Price sounds about right too, at $4.99.
