iMovie 3.0 for iPhone and iPad makes it easy to create your first video. Engadget

While Apple’s iMovie software has always been a powerful piece of movie-editing software, its main appeal is that it’s a free and simple way to start creating your own videos. But iMovie for iPhone and iPad offers surprisingly little in the way of direction when you open it – it’s up to the user to decide how to structure their movie.

Apple is changing this significantly today with iMovie 3.0 for iOS and iPadOS, a free download available now. The software includes two new creation modes, Magic Movie and Storyboard, to help people create videos for the first time.

Magic Movie automates a lot of the video creation process, while still leaving room for a lot of customization, assuming you want to dig into the details. Apple recommends that you start by selecting an album with related video clips and photos, but you can also select images and videos manually. From there, Magic Movie will analyze the content and look for things like faces, dialogue, and action to select the best parts of the video clip and build a movie from there, complete with transitions and music. The end result reminds me of a lot of the “memories” that the iOS Photos app automatically creates — those memories also combine videos and photos from the same day or event and add a soundtrack and transitions to it.

Once Magic Movie has created a project for you, you can do tons of customizations from there. Naturally, you can delete photos or videos you don’t want in the project, as well as quickly trim clips to show only the action you want. Instead of using the traditional horizontal timeline view, clips and images are contained in the vertically-scrolling left-hand column (on the iPhone, this appears below the video preview); You can easily drag and drop them to rearrange the flow of your videos. And tapping on an item in the left-hand column gives you a great set of editing controls.

Another great part of iMovie 3.0’s customization tools is a feature called Styles. These apply to the entire video and include things like fonts, color palettes and filters, music, and transitions. There are 20 total to choose from, and while you can just set one and forget it, you also have the option to go in and adjust those individual features if you want more control over the final product.

Storyboard features are very similar to those of Magic Movie, but it is a more manual tool. Storyboard starts by giving you over 20 different video templates to choose from – options include video themes like “DIY,” “Day in Life,” “How It Works,” “Gaming,” “Q&A” and more Huh. When you select one of those options, the column on the left fills up with a rough structure for that video genre, including broad categories and then examples of specific shots.

In a demo, Apple showed off a DIY project, which includes categories like “Introduction,” “Overview,” “Supplies.” Then each of those sections is filled in with suggestions for different types of shots (wide shot, close-up and so forth). While you can obviously import videos directly from your library in these suggestions, you can also shoot directly on your iPhone or iPad and insert that clip into the slot.

Like Magic Movie, you can re-order and delete any suggestion from the left-hand column, and tapping into it lets you make more involved edits. And new styles that are part of Magic Movie can be applied here as well. The basic idea behind storyboards is to give aspiring creators a framework to use when trying to put together a video, and until I’ve tried the app, it seems like a smart idea. As someone who has done very little video editing in my time, I could certainly see using a storyboard as inspiration for getting started on a video if I had an idea I wanted to pursue. Was.

Once you’ve finished your creation, you can export it in a variety of video formats, in resolutions up to 4K; The HDR content you filmed can be retained as well. You can also export your iMovie project and open it on a Mac. But before you do that, you should know that the Storyboard and Magic Movie features are only available when using iMovie on the iPad or iPhone. Videos created with those tools will be exported to a format compatible with iMovie on the Mac, but you won’t be able to edit or convert styles, for example.

If you want to try out these new iMovie features, the updated app arrives today and will work on any iPhone running iOS 15.2 or higher, and any iPad running iOS 15.2 or higher.