Make your own movies on your iPhone

iMovie app allows you to record, edit and export your own professional looking HD movies on your iOS device – to be precise the iPhone 4, iPod touch 4th generation or iPad 2.

The app makes smart use of the multi-touch gestures to allow you to add videos, photos, music and sound effects, and piece them together. You can choose to add footage from your camera roll, or capture video directly through iMovie. Similarly, music can be added from your iPod Library on your device, or you can record audio through the application.

It is a pretty comfortable experience, especially if you’re running it on the iPad 2. The timeline is easily manipulated, dragging to cut clip lengths, pinching to zoom in, double-tapping to open clip options, etc. It does take a while to figure all these gestures out though. for this reason, it would be nice if the app had an interactive tutorial or annotated editing screen (like GarageBand has), instead of hiding the information in help pages.

iMovie includes a selection of eight themes to help you create attractive movies, allowing you to customize them with your own titles and location details (which can be automatically detected by the app, incidentally). There’s also a selection of theme music and sound effects to liven up your videos. However, iMovie is definitely in need of more transitions and video filters.

There is a great range of exporting features. Beside saving the finished movie to the Camera Roll you can send it to YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, CNN iReport, and even publish it on iTunes.
Of course, iMovie lacks the power of its desktop-based big brother, but as mobile phone video editing suites go, it’s the best out there right now.