5 New Video Editing Apps for your iPhone

You push the button, we do the rest…..

I have been on jury duty all this week for the State of New York.

The last time I did jury duty, you sat in hard wooden chairs in a green-painted room. No cell phone or computers were allowed. Lots of old newspapers were scattered around. It made you wonder who the criminals were here.

Now, the State of New York has modified the rules. There are pretty comfortable chairs and more importantly, there is wifi.  They allow cell phone (but no photographs!)  The only thing you can’t do is leave. They warn repeatedly that to ‘not serve your sentence term is a felony violation and you will be prosecuted. As the building seems to be filled with both cops and judges, I am sure they are serious.

The upshot is that I have a lot of time on my hands and as such, I have begun playing around with some of the newest apps for iPhone video.  As my book, iPhone Millionaire – Six Weeks To Change Your Life (McGraw Hill) is coming out in October, (shameless plug), I thought I should stay up to date on the latest developments in the iPhone video world.  And they’re pretty impressive.

The great success of George Eastman’s KODAK company was, in no small measure, due to its core philosophy: You push the button, we do the rest.

Before Eastman, photography had been the purview of an elite few.  Photography was both expensive and complex, requiring both the technology and the chemistry to process the images.  Eastman removed all of that, and almost overnight, photography exploded as the hobby of, well, pretty much everyone.

While pretty much everyone shoots video today, particularly with the ubiquity of iPhones, editing, the thing that makes video really ‘watchable’ is still restricted to those who can parse out the complexities of Final Cut or even iMovie.   Video would really become as popular as photography unitl it is as simple as Eastman made taking pictures.

Now, there are a few new apps that attempt to do just that.

NUMBER 1:   Reeli
What makes Reeli different from the other apps (and some of them are quite good) is that Reeli is focused on making the entire process as simple as possible. Like our own 5-shot method, Reeli boils down formats and films to some very basic principles of what you need to make a compelling video. They start with the shooting process:  shoot this, this and this. Then, once you have them, just drop them into this format.  Voila. A movie! Push another button and it’s uploaded to Youtube or Facebook or wherever.   Also, Reeli is free!

The other apps (and I have plenty of time here in prison, so I have played with a lot), are more along the lines of adding effects or variants of iMovie.

NUMBER 2: iMovie
We all love Apple products, and iMovie, a $4.99 is probably the best of the more ‘conventional’ editing softwares for your iPhone.  It allows you a great deal of control over the editing process and it’s got a fair number of options for music and graphics.  It isn’t the ‘you push the button, we do the rest’ simplicity I found in Reeli, but it is a good next step up in terms of sophistication if you want to start down the path of filmmaker.

NUMBER 3:  CinemanFX for video
Cineman FX is a bit like iMovie, but at $1.99 a bit less expensive. (in these times, every penny counts).  It’s big on filters and effects, but doesn’t let you play with the video very much.  This is a problem with most of the apps.  Not much in the way of editing functionality.  It’s as though you took 100 still pictures, but you have to look at all of them.

NUMBER 4:  Splice Video Editor
At the other extreme we find Splice. This is more about video editing than effects. It’s fairly intuitive and it allows you to trim and adjust the speed of your videos.  At $3.99 it’s reasonable (none of these are like the days when we spent $1,000 for Final Cut Studio), but again, it’s work. The danger here is that you overshoot and spend your life trimming and splicing.

NUMBER 5: Viddy
If you’re interested in cutting, editing, splicing or trimming, then VIDDY is not for you.
Viddy is all about ‘effecting’ raw video – adding music and filters and stuff, and then uploading it to the web.  The makers here are trying to create the Instagram of video.  As you are limited to 15 seconds of video, maybe they are also trying to create the Twitter of video.  To me, this is like George Eastman offering a Kodak camera that took one picture.  But what do I know? So far, it’s popular, but it gets boring fast.