Will Head
Don’t waste your money on a mini HD camcorder. The iPhone 4 lets you shoot in HD, edit your film and then upload the finished movie to the web.
You can’t have helped but notice the number of small, solid-state HD video cameras that have been popping up recently. While there were flash-based camcorders before, Flip reinvented the format with its take-anywhere Flip Ultra camera with easy edit-and-upload software in 2007. It wasn’t HD to start with, but the fact it had a flip-out USB port so you didn’t need to carry a cable around with you and was pre-loaded with editing software meant you could shoot video and get it online with the minimum of hassle.
An HD version followed soon after and it wasn’t long before the market was flooded with small, lightweight, HD solid-state cameras from the likes of Kodak, Sony and others. Early models may have suffered from poor optics, over-aggressive compression and pitiful low light performance, but they’ve improved immensely over time.
While you’ll still need a professional-level camcorder for the best results, one of these tiny cameras can often be used in situations where you don’t want to take your full kit, either because of its size or the risk it will get damaged or stolen. There’s an obvious trade-off in terms of video quality, but what you get in return is something that you can always carry with you and not worry too much if it gets bashed around a bit.
However, while all the cameras let you capture footage in the field, you’ll still need to hook them up to your Mac to pull the movie off before you can edit and upload it. The interface and controls are too basic to allow editing, not to mention the camera not packing sufficient oomph to let you chop up HD video. And even if you could, there’s no built-in Internet connection you can use to upload your finished masterpiece.
This all changes, however, with the iPhone 4. Not only can it capture 720p HD video, but Apple has released a version of iMovie for its latest smartphone (see MacUser, 30 July, p39) as well, so you can cut up video straight on the handset. Throw in the fact that the iPhone has an always-on Internet connection and you have a complete HD filming, editing and uploading suite in the palm of your hands. Even just a couple of years ago many computers would have struggled to do all that. The fact the iPhone 4 can do it without breaking a sweat is frankly nothing short of amazing.
iMovie, as you may have guessed, is aimed primarily at consumers and not professionals. It mimics the interface of its bigger sibling on the Mac, so don’t expect to have a shrunk-down version of Final Cut at your fingertips. But that’s no bad thing.
When you’re at your desk, creating the very best edit possible is your number-one priority. When you’re mobile, the speed that you can get something online is also a competing factor. The fact that iMovie for iPhone strips you of many editing powers lets you concentrate on what exactly you’re trying to achieve. If the video needs to be online as soon as physically possible then the simpler the edit the better. You’ve got just the right amount of tools available to achieve that, which is mostly a good thing.
It takes a little while to get your head around the workflow, but once you’ve worked it out, it’s pretty simple. Start by picking a theme – you have to use one of the five supplied even if you don’t actually want one. However, once you’ve made a choice, you can completely ignore all the theme elements.
Next, import footage from your camera roll. Once a clip is on the timeline, you can trim the start and end points to isolate the bit you want. For long clips, this can be a little tedious, as there’s no cut available. If you only want three seconds from a three-minute clip, then you’re going to spend a lot of time dragging the end points across the screen to trim the video down. The best solution is to only shoot short clips, where possible.
You can then choose a transition between clips – each theme comes with one of its own – or there’s crossfade or straight cut. You can only trim clips to the nearest second, so you may need to readjust them to get the best look once you’ve chosen the transition.
You can then add a title to any clips – again, you’ll only find three choices available per theme, but they do the job. Then when you’ve finished trimming and moving your clips around, you can export them back to the camera roll at 360p (640 x 360), 540p (960 x 540) or 720p (1280 x 720) resolution. You’ve basically got just the right amount of controls to do the job and once you get the hang of how things work, it’s pretty quick.
To upload your file, locate it in the camera roll, hit the share button and choose whether you want to email it, send it as an MMS or upload it to MobileMe or YouTube. One slight hitch is that if you use any of these options, your file will be scaled to a resolution of 568 x 320 before sending, which means no HD uploads straight to YouTube. If you want to grab the HD version, you’ll need to sync with iPhoto on your Mac and extract it from there.
That’s the basic functionality of iMovie for iPhone straight out of the App Store, and if that’s all you had at your disposal, you could still create some pretty good-looking results. However, there are a few things you can do to make your final videos look all that more professional.
If you create a plain white image that measures 1280 x 720 pixels and another black image and sync them to your camera roll, you can drop these in between clips and use the crossfade to simulate a dip to a white or black transition. You’ve effectively doubled the number of transitions at your disposal.
Next, if you want more control over the opening titles or end credits, you can create those beforehand on your Mac. Just create a 720p project and make your titles as normal. You’ll then need to export them as H.264 format and ensure in the settings that the Profile is set to Main and the Level is 3.1. This will create a compatible MP4 file, but before you sync it to your camera roll, you need to change the extension from .mp4 to .mov so iMovie will let you to import it. You can then add these clips to your timeline just like those you’ve natively shot using the iPhone’s camera.
Finally, to get high-definition footage off your iPhone and straight onto the Internet, install the free Pixelpipe app from the App Store. Simply sign up for an account – or log in using your Twitter ID if you have one. Then hit Settings > Add destinations and scroll all the way down to YouTube. Plug in your YouTube username and password, and you’re ready to go. Simply upload your full-resolution video to Pixelpipe and it will then send it to YouTube at its native resolution. You can also choose other video accounts such as Blip or Vimeo, or even send a version to your Dropbox file store as well.
Uploading a 90-second 99MB high-definition video over wifi took 20 minutes to reach Pixelpipe. It took another three minutes before it then appeared on YouTube, which is pretty impressive.
All in all, if you do any video work that involves getting footage online as fast as possible, then an iPhone 4 and a copy of iMovie are definitely worth having around. To get an idea of what’s possible, here’s an HD video, with opening animated titles, extra transitions and an end ident all filmed, edited and uploaded completely from an iPhone 4: tinyurl.com/2ebebrb.