Apple upgrades iMovie for iPhone & iPad with creative touch

Tools to speed up your movie making

Apple has updated one of its iconic applications, iMovie, introducing new tools and features it hopes makes it easy for everyone to create video on their iPad or iPhone. The new version isn’t yet available for Mac.

Why iMovie matters

iMovie has always been a quietly important application for Apple. It was originally released in 1999, when it was designed to show how much better Macs were and still are than basic Windows systems. The application then became part of the iLife suite, which showed us early on what the potential for digital everything would be. Fast forward to today, and you have an application that makes movies on any Apple device.

Apple seems to be calling this iMovie 3.0, which is strange as I distinctly recall using iMovie 3 in 2003. I guess this may be the third full version release on iPhones and iPads, perhaps.

The new edition offers Storyboards and Magic Movie.

What Apple said

“iMovie has empowered millions of people around the world to create and share their stories through video,” said Bob Borchers, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.

“This latest version of iMovie, featuring Storyboards and Magic Movie, simplifies video creation even further, and we think it will continue to inspire the next wave of video creators to dive in and get started.”

What are Storyboards?

Storyboards helps aspiring content creators and moviemakers learn to edit and improve their video storytelling skills with pre-made templates for 20 popular types of shared video, so that’s topics such as  DIY, cooking tutorials, news reports, product reviews, science experiments and so on.

[Also read: How to use Apple’s iMovie video effects]

Storyboards helps you get something good together, offering flexible shot lists and step-by-step guidance on which clips to capture for each video type. Each storyboard has a shot list that organizes clips to tell a specific narrative. E

ach placeholder also includes an illustrative thumbnail, along with a tip that asks a question or suggests how to shoot that clip to make it more interesting. For added customization, shots can be added, reordered, and deleted from a storyboard as needed.

Completed videos are easily shared via Messages, Mail, and social media.

What is Magic Movie?

Magic Movie puts together a polished video from the clips and photos a user selects, automatically adding transitions, effects, and music to the edit.

Both new features include a range of styles to help personalize the final look and feel of a video, including titles, filters, transitions, color palettes, and music, all designed to work together.

To create a Magic Movie, a user simply selects an album, or any group of photos or images from their library, and Magic Movie instantly identifies the best parts of the footage and creates the project.

Creators can then tweak the movie for a unique result, rearranging or deleting clips in the simplified shot list, or by editing the project further. Styles can be added to improve the look and feel of the entire video. Magic Movies can be shared via Messages, Mail and socmed.

Creators can experiment by applying different video styles that include titles and transitions, as well as options for title layouts, fonts, filters, and color palettes. Music tracks dynamically adjust to fit the length of a project, and users can refine each clip with intuitive editing tools like trim, split, clip speed, and clip volume.

Availability

iMovie 3.0, including the new Storyboards and Magic Movie features, is available today as a free update on the App Store for devices running iOS 15.2 or later and iPadOS 15.2 or later. It may now be time to figure out what you can do with Cinematic Mode on iPhone 13.

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