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There has been an incredible amount of innovation and emerging development directly sparked from powerful mobile devices like the iPhone4 — the business of movie-making being one of them.

With its’ remarkable capability to shoot high-definition video 720p at 30fps, devices like the iPhone 4 are quickly eliminating the need to purchase an additional device like a Flip Cam and best of all, it supports an app ecosystem full of multitouch supported video editing apps for editing on the go.

This is great news for breaking indie artists trying to make it on a wider scale– especially for those without a budget for camera equipment and video editors.

We’ve already seen some amazing iPhone 4 videos sprouting up. One that comes to mind is a music video done by Flakjakt, an indie folk artist that used the iPhone 4’s popularity to leverage their video’s success by marketing it on the web as the first music video shot using the device.  Take a look at their video below, it’s nothing short of mind-blowing that it was shot using a phone.

I’d like to tell you that this video was also edited using a mobile app like iMovie but it was more likely colour treated and edited in higher-end software like Apple’s Final Cut Pro.  Luckily though, editing small clips, adding transitions, soundtracks and uploading to YouTube doesn’t require an aspiring mobile movie maker to dish out a fortune for high-end software to create sophisticated looking short vids.

Battle of the Video Editing Apps:  iMovie v ReelDirector

iMovie AppiMovie
This app is the mobile version of Apple’s desktop application for Mac (iMovie) and it was heavily marketed as a huge benefit to having the iPhone 4 ( iMovie is only available for iPhone 4 users).   That being said, I had big expectations for this app.

The user interface is beautiful and offers numerous options from the editing screen; assign a theme, shoot video on the fly, choose a clip from the camera roll or play the video.

Creating a Project
Video clips, images from the photo gallery and audio from the music library can all be inserted within a project.  The pre-selection screen is really handy for quickly finding clips.  When you’re choosing a clip(s), the videos from your media library are stretched out so that several frames of the video can be viewed prior to being selected.  And, with the use of the pan and zoom feature you can create great looking image slideshows.  Sadly though, it’s not possible to do this with video, just pictures. AFAIK

iMovie

Themes
After iMovie launches, it requires you to set a theme; “modern, bright, travel, playful and news”.   The stylized themes will alter the placement of text, transitions and the overall look of the video.  There are additionally 1 minute soundtracks also included within the themes and are free to use.  The templates are pretty slick but lack the control of text placement.  If the theme has text in the lower third of the video, the text seems to be stuck there and placement cannot be altered aside from choosing whether it shows up as opening, middle or ending of the clip.

Transitions
By adding more than one clip to the timeline, a transition icon will appear between the videos.  Transitions can be modified by time (.5 to 2 seconds) and effect; theme, cross dissolve or none.  I find these settings a bit lightweight and it would be helpful if the “theme” transitions were listed in full instead of having to switch back and forth between themes to find a transition.

Clip Settings
When a clip is selected in the timeline additional options can be tweaked.  These set of options include text, location (location data), turning audio on/off and the ability to trim a clip by sliding your finger across the screen.

One of the biggest benefits of the app is the ability to save videos to 720p, although you may notice a difference in quality depending on the method of upload.  Overall, the aesthetics are brilliant but it’s not as robust as I’d hoped, not for the buzz surrounding it anyway.

iMovie takes some getting used to and isn’t as organic as you’d expect from an app created by Apple.   As an example, there are tons of threads full of users asking how to add text, an option that isn’t clearly visible by simply selecting a clip.. unless of course you knew to select in the timeline and hit settings.   Just saying.



Reel Director IconReel Director
This app is available on the iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4 and iPad and it offers a list of excellent options and features for a mobile editor.

For starters, the app is extremely user-friendly and doesn’t hide away any features within the settings.  For example, after tapping on a clip within the timeline, all of the clip options are available such as cutting, transitions and text– all displayed in a menu on the same screen.

Creating a Project

By beginning a new project and tapping the add media icon a user has the option to add video, images, grab a song from the iPod or record audio from the mic.  Nicely there are a set of project properties that give users an overview of the entire project; the opening title, text & style, transition type and some opening & closing credit options.   And, if there is an option to flip video clips on various angles or pan and zoom a video with iMovie it was lost on me, it is however possible with ReelDirector.  I thought the pan and zoom feature worked really well.  Projects can be directly exported to email, YouTube or saved to the camera roll.

Themes & Clip Settings
Reel Director doesn’t offer pre-designed templates or themes for your project but it does offer a lot of control over text placement, subtitles, font size and length of time the text remains on the screen.  There’s a bit of a drawback with this app, similar to desktop editing software, Reel Director requires you to render clips before previewing the project changes — a requirement that can take a bit of time.  At one point, it took about 2 minutes to render a 30 second clip.

Reel Director

Transitions
The amount of transition effects are quite impressive although the length of the transitions apparently cannot be modified as they can in iMovie. There are about 30 transitions to choose from; fade through white, cross dissolve, blur fade, wipe left etc.

VIDEO TEST: iMovie vs Reel Director

ReelDirector allows users to compress video to high-quality although they were not specific about the settings so I thought I’d do a test.  The same video was saved to the camera roll using the highest quality export settings in both iMovie and ReelDirector.  It appears the quality is basically the same ( viewing with the 720p settings) on YouTube, however you’ll notice there was some serious cropping done by iMovie. I don’t like that at all.

Imported Videos, MP4: iMovie vs Reel Director
There’s another thing I noticed when trying to import a clip into iMovie.  After syncing an iPhone supported video (mp4) with the iPhone 4 I found I wasn’t able to see it within the imported files within iMovie so I fired up the ReelDirector app to see if it was the same case.  Guess what, the file was available in ReelDirector.  I haven’t done enough investigating on this one but I’m guessing the mobile version of iMovie doesn’t support imported mp4 clips? I’m hoping there’s a geek out there that can shed some light on this for me.

The Bottom Line:
There are huge benefits to using ReelDirector such as the long list of transitions, control over text placement and the ability to pan & zoom and rotate video.  Based on the tests I performed, ReelDirector also appears to stack up in the quality department and there’s clearly some (unwanted) sizing stuff going on behind the scenes with iMovie.   ReelDirector for the win!

iMovie $4.99  ReelDirector $3.99

Below is some footage I shot using the iPhone 4. Happy movie making =)