Recommended only for the 3GS. Older iPhones/iPods will run it but only for editing sequences of stills, and only the recent iPod Touch with a headset (as opposed to just headphones) will support voice-over.

So yesterday a tweet flew by about a video editing app on the iPhone. In the business of video editing software development myself, and having spent some spare cycles imagining an iPhone version of iMovie, I just had to check it out.

Nexvio has three iPhone apps for the editing hobbyist:

• Slowmo does basic timewarps (no interframe blending or motion estimation of course)
• ReelMoments enables time-lapse photography, and stitches together a video for you
• ReelDirector is an app to edit movie sequences from videos and photos from your iPhone’s Camera Roll

I didn’t bother with Slowmo, and ReelMoments is fun, but ReelDirector is not only quite a decent app, it’s a reasonably significant event in the video editing world as far as I’m concerned.

With the iPhone 3GS you can, out of the box, shoot a video, trim its head and tail, and then upload to YouTube without breaking a sweat. This is great if you happen to capture a short, continuous moment of interest that’s worthy (the bar is low here) of a presence on the internet.

Add ReelDirector to the mix, and you can move to storytelling. These are exciting times when you are able to shoot, cut, finish, and publish a movie on-the-go using a single handheld device.

I’m not a professional editor. I know a lot about video editing software (from web services, to consumer software, all the way up to $500K DI finishing systems). I’m also an active video editing hobbyist and a huge fan of iMovie. So as much as I don’t pretend to be a master of the craft, I can certainly put any video editing system through the ringer and get a good feel for its design and function.

Using ReelDirector, after about 30 minutes of work while I was also cooking dinner I put together this video using only my iPhone.

The Low-Down
ReelDirector can only access video from your Camera Roll, so don’t think you can sync movies to your iPhone and edit from there. ReelDirector is geared for the shoot-and-cut crowd not the mashup crowd. We’re talking about the hobbyist, the vigilante journalist, the mobile videographer. No doubt some sort of porn site will spawn from this.

• Set up a project. You create a project, set properties which include an optional title slate, end slate/credits, and default transition and duration. Easy-peasy. Taking a page out of iMovie, there’s not too much flexibility in terms of title styles, but you’ve got bread-and-butter coverage. The selection of transitions is pretty good, but again, don’t go looking for massive levels of customization. This is Duplo, not Lego. Certainly not Mechano.

• Add video to the timeline. Select videos from the Camera Roll (you can trim them on the way in—head/tail are preserved—and/or trim after adding them to the timeline), and photos (all synced photos, not just camera roll photos in this case).

• Add audio to the timeline. Drop in a music track and record voice-over on-the-fly. The V-O feature is great, and you can record V-O over a music bed, though I only managed to get the left side to pick up. Might have overlooked something there. Furthermore…

  The music (or whatever audio file) workflow is not so hot. Nexvio acknowledges as much. You can’t hook directly into your iTunes library, instead, there’s this imaginative but clunky method where you get your iPhone on the same WiFi network as a laptop/desktop, then point the laptop’s web browser to an IP address, then use a file upload mechanism to get the files into a ReelDirector audio library. It works, but is the one chink in the storytelling-on-the-go philosophy in that if you don’t have the right audio already imported and you’re nowhere near a WiFi network, you’re not going to be able to get that Cyndi Lauper track that’s already on your iPhone into the mix. Let’s hope they improve this in an update soon.

• Add spit-and-polish. Although laying down sources is easy and smooth, working with timeline segments, trimming, adding transitions, and so on, is a little trickier. It’s not terribly hard to figure out what to do—the UI design is really pretty good. But the experience suffers from the fact that you can’t ever get a representative preview of the edited sequence. You can play each segment independently, but to see the transitions, feel the beats between cuts, and hear multitrack audio over video, you have to exit the timeline editor and render the entire movie.

  Now I respect that there are technical reasons for this, limitations of the device. All things considered, Nexvio has done a good job with a device that isn’t quite ready to support a compelling video editing experience. Bold of Nexvio to put this out there, and I think there will be some (many?) hobbyists and others like me who will be willing to bear with some klunk because the over-arching ability to go from concept-to-published-movie using a phone is groundbreaking.

• Render the movie. Rendering is fast enough, given that most projects in this environment will be short enough. My ~2 minute movie took about 2 minutes to render. Because of the lack of in-timeline render preview, I did have to go in and out of the editorial workspace about 5 times and re-render until I worked out some kinks. When I was eventually satisfied I saved the rendered result to the Camera Roll and used the built-in YouTube publish option to move it online.

Some screenshots:

Now what?

If I put away my professional interest in this product, and suppress my early-adopter/hobbyist enthusiasm for it… what am I left with if I distill, as much as possible, the voice-of-the-customer?

One thing about editing is that it adds some time to the process. You’ll easily spend 10 times your project’s duration in the editing phase. Another thing is that editing is storytelling, and not everyone is a storyteller, and therefore has much interest in shooting to edit and then, worse, actually editing. The consumer mobile video capture experience is and will always be (he said, boldly) primarily a shoot-and-post. The built-in 3GS trim option is enough.

For someone like me who shoots to edit, ReelDirector won’t change my habits much. I need more or less uninterrupted time to edit, and in general I’d sooner wait until I could fire up the laptop, sync the 3GS video footage to iPhoto, then use iMovie to cut-and-publish. iMovie is still a vastly superior editorial workspace.

ReelDirector is required only if I need to edit and post on the go, and I’m honestly not sure how often I’ll find myself in that situation. If I witness and capture an event that needs to get online ASAP, I’ll probably just shoot-and-post. So as impressed as I am with the product, I suspect it’ll sit there, idle, unless I make a conscious decision to use it for a project in spite of taking a few workflow hits, just, ’cause, you know, it’s cool.

There may be some valid use-cases. With this solution independent vigilante journalists have everything they need to capture, edit, add V-O and basic titles to make something that doesn’t just bear in/out witness but actually reports a story. In that case, shoot-edit-and-post on-the-go is a requirement. But I’d like to see that use-case proven in the field—at this point I just give it a maybe. And beyond that, I’m just not sure where the sweet-spot is, or flip-side, what’s missing from the product to make it a legitimate solution.

For industry peeps and hobbyists, I’d still recommend buying it if only to try it out and think seriously about what it means to have video editing on a mobile device. At $7.99 (Canada) it’s a pretty easy purchase decision, and a good price to get a taste and feel for what is a significant milestone in the video editing world.

Pete shows Tricia his first home movie.

Follow Pete’s tweets: @pbickerson