iMovie Review

WHAT IS IT?

Encouraging amateur movie makers to up their game, iMovie is a box of moving image tricks to help you transform humdrum home videos into Odeon-filling epics.

WHAT'S IT LIKE?

If you’ve ever been forced to sit and endure someone else’s holiday videos or, indeed,
you like to inflict your own home video hell on others, then you’ll be more than a little grateful for iMovie. Now we’re not saying every video of a child’s birthday party, friend’s wedding, school sports day or other assorted dull occasion needs to have its own trailer. Or be treated in post-production to an array of effects, like slow motion or instant replay, but now we’ve played with iMovie, we wish they all did.

This is a one-stop movie editing suite for your iPhone or - ideally - iPad, both video and audio can be tweaked, tampered with, touched up and generally upgraded from average AV tedium into a cinematic masterpiece without the need to spend years getting a Media Studies degree.

Editing couldn’t be easier thanks to the use of coloured bar waveforms, drag and drop stock effects and theme music, and individual frame selection, while Peter Jackson wannabes can go much further by adding music from their iTunes library, trimming it to perfectly fit selected scenes, setting their own transitions, chopping and changing frame locations, adding fades and even recording voiceovers to place where they wish.

For the home-video enthusiast, the possibilities that iMovie allows will probably see it become something of an obsession, if an admittedly pretty frivolous one, but by contrast, for the video blogger intent on clogging the web with their home-made epics, iMovie could well become an absolutely essential tool.

OUR VERDICT

Slick, high def home video made easy for editing intermediates. iMovie will spell a dramatic increase in quality homegrown movies. And we think that's a good thing.