Making Videos on iOS – More PC Experience

Extra Personal computer experience Day Seven

Today was the day to do some video shooting and editing as part of my extra personal computer experience. All about my jump into going iOS only due to the iMac being in dry dock, needing a hard drive replacement. So I shot some video using my iPhone while I was out walking the dog. I live in a very quiet neighbourhood so it’s very easy for me to shoot video while walking along the road. I started by picking a camera application called Kinomatic. I could have decided upon the built-in Apple camera app, but I thought I would try out one of the extra third party apps I have. It turns out that Kinomatic is a good application for shooting video. I also tried another I that’s called FiLMic Pro which didn’t turn out quite so well. When I pulled the clips into the Pinnacle video editing application there was a marked difference in the quality of the video. Kinomatic gave me a much higher quality video all round. The video clips I got from FiLMic Pro had problems with focus, white balance and didn’t look good at all. When I’ve used FiLMic before the video has looked pretty good, so I wonder if there was a problem with the settings. It might be down to the fact I was filming myself and not able to control things as I would’ve done if I was filming something or somebody else. I used my iPhone 6 to shoot the video. I was able to use an over the air connection to send the video to the iPad where I wanted to do the video editing. It’s possible to do video editing on the iPhone, but when you have a larger screen available, why struggle with something smaller.

Sending the video to the iPad from the iPhone

 

Using Kinomatic

Shooting with FiLMic Pro

 

Which iOS video editor to use

It’s been awhile since I did any video editing on iOS and I have one or two I can choose from. There is the old favourite, iMovie and the one I’ve used before is Pinnacle. Both of these have their good points, but in the past I have preferred using Pinnacle. So today I went for this one and tomorrow I will try making a movie using iMovie on iOS. I do have a number of editors for video and some of them are very easy to use. You just throw the video clips in and it kind of organises itself. I wanted to get something to give me more control with the clips in the timeline.

It was time to reacquaint myself with Pinnacle

Seeing as I’d already brought the video clips in from my iPhone onto the photo roll it was extremely easy to see these clips in the Pinnacle video editing application. Then it simply a matter of dragging and dropping the clips into the timeline and making a few alterations here and there. It is possible to trim the amount of video before dropping clips onto the timeline by using in and out points. From within the application there are a number of tutorial videos you can get your hands on to learn out more on how the application works exactly. There were a number of things I had forgotten and I needed to be reminded off. I had to watch the video on how to add titles, so that the titles were on a layer over the video already on the timeline. It was a simple case of dragging the type of text I wanted from the selection available, onto the video in the timeline and choosing the button composite. Once that was done it was also possible to change the font of the text and the colour.

Choosing elements from the themes

Within the area containing the themes there were openings and endings as well as text titles to be added. There were lower thirds to choose from, for example. Some of these elements have drop zones in which you can drop photos or videos. There is a limited selection of these things, but the ones there are quite useful and look as though you could have made them in the Apple Motion 5 application. When using some of these you’ll end up with some fairly impressive looking videos to post to your video sites Such as YouTube. You have to render the video when you are using titles and theme elements.

 

In Pinnacle you have a decent variety of transitions. With these transitions to go from one clip to another it’s always best to keep it simple. It’s usually better to go with a straight cut or to have a cross dissolve. It’s not good for the viewers eyes if you use too many different types of transition.

Getting professional effects with pinnacle

There is a type of transition called the L cut. This is where they sound from the second clip starts before the video of the next clip. All you have to do is to separate the audio from the video in the timeline and make a cut in the right place to do this type of audio transition. Have a look at the tutorial videos to see how to do this.

Uploading the final results of the video editing

I tried to upload the video from the Wi-Fi at my home. But I have such a poor Internet connection, especially for upload that I ended up having to cancel it before it got halfway. I would have left it running so that it could finish, but I needed to leave the house and go to work. Where I work I can connect to a 4G connection and with this, the video that didn’t get even halfway in over half an hour, was uploaded in less than two minutes.

[su_youtube url=”http://youtu.be/E7AreD6K3Uk”]

A good more personal computer experience

Editing video is no problem at all on iOS. Adding video and audio clips is easy. Manipulating it all on the timeline is fast and effective. I was able to see that everything was looking good and ready to export out of Pinnacle. I sen the editing video out to YouTube and here are the results. I left in the questionable Clips shot with FiLMic so you could see the difference between it and the video from Kinomatic. The sound recorded better with Kinomatic also.

That was all I did this morning with my iPhone and iPad – Shoot and edit video. Apart from the usual looking at the emails, Twitter and Facebook as I was having breakfast. I dictated this into Ulysees on the iPhone and edited it on the iPad when I finished work. During work I used Editorial and the automation tricks I have set up to help me do my job. I uploaded the finished video when the iPad was connected to the iPhone Hotspot. Blazing fast upload with 4G. I listened to podcasts while at work with the Overcast app. Wrote into the journal I keep in Day One.