Recording and Editing videos on iPhone4S is quick and great!

I like video recording and I’m trying to post every now and then a useful video with some productivity tips and tricks on my Productive! Show page. The only problem with frequent posting is how much time it takes to record and edit a video… or at least it used to take :-)

The problem with HD quality

When I discovered I could record HD movies on the iPhone I was thrilled about that… but my Mac wasn’t. Importing a huge close-to-a-gig-in-size file to my iMovie app on my Macbook Air took lots of time… and later editing it took even more… and as video editing is not my “core business” it annoyed me how much time it takes for me. Yet I still wanted the videos to feel personal and not to be done by some professional. And I wanted them in HD.

iMovie on the iPhone to the rescue.

I watched a great video by VidCaster CEO Kieran Farr where he explains that editing is not just my problem. It’s everyone’s problem and we should strive to edit less and preferably not edit at all. He also mentioned iMovie on the iPhone as a quick way to edit videos without actually moving the clips in raw and importing to a desktop app. I love simplicity and time saving… so I gave it a try.

My daughter is dancing!

To check it out I took three clips of my daughter dancing on my iPhone and imported them to the iMovie. Editing personal videos is even more painful than my “professional” ones. It was too easy. From three 5-minute clips I quickly compiled a short 4-minute video of my daughter’s best moves. It took me 15 minutes of editing time. Fairly quick, especially for my first time with iMovie on the iPhone’s small screen. The iPhone 4S is pretty darn fast and handles iMovie really well.

Intro and outro

To make my “Productive Magazine Shows” really professional I took some old clips and compiled quickly a short intro and outro that would accompany all of my future videos. 3-sec intro and 5-sec outro. Then I had to export it to my iPhone so that these clips would be available in my iMovie. I had to transfer these clips to iPhoto and in iTunes make sure the option to “transfer videos” is set to “on”. After a sync I had both clips ready to mix :-)

3 episodes of my show recorded and edited in… 1.5 hours!

Wow, that was quick. I recorded three episodes and edited them on my iPhone in only one and a half hours! And I had several takes of each episode so it wasn’t all that easy, but editing the shows in iMovie was really painless. Tomorrow I’m posting the first show about my stand-up desk experience.

Overall I’m amazed my iPhone became my fully-fledged Video Studio and enables joyful video recording and editing that takes less time and delivers fantastic results. Steve Jobs was really right - this device is truly amazing :-)

Did you ever try to edit your videos on the phone? How do you handle video content?