iMovie for iPhone 4: The Details

One of the coolest features that we saw at WWDC was the announcement about iMovie for iPhone. Though I postulated that it shouldn’t cost the reported $4.99, it’s still a major platform piece, and it will bring about an entirely new sub-genre of video production that a lot of people seem to be keen on having.

During the keynote, however, Jobs didn’t give a lot of information about iMovie for iPhone, he instead focused on a few features and then moved on. We now have, thanks to an article at TidBITS, some more insight about the upcoming app.

Here’s the quick rundown, then we’ll talk about what we see:

• iPhone 4 only
• Can only be edited on the phone “currently”
• Most likely can work with imported clips
• No iPad compatability
• Will ship June 24th, with the iPhone 4

iPhone 4 only.  Read that carefully.  You won’t be able to run iMovie for iPhone on any other platform, reportedly because the processing requirements are simply too high.

As for only being edited on the phone “currently”, I’m going to lay my chips down and say that this will change pretty quickly.  In order for products created in iMovie for iPhone to come to their full potential, we’ll need to be able to export and continue editing on the desktop.  It’s a simple matter of usability.

Imported clips is another area that wasn’t specificially addressed, but here’s why it makes sense:  At present, you can pull clips from the Camera Roll, which are clips you’ve already shot.  It would make sense then that you’d be able to import properly-formatted clips into the camera roll and use them within iMovie for the iPhone.  If this isn’t the case, we’d be hugely surprised.

The lack of iPad integration, honestly, isn’t that surprising.  However, it’s good that we have clarification on this now.  TidBITS postulates, and I’d have to agree, that it’s due to the pixel density limitation of the iPad.  Though the iPad is beautiful, it simply doesn’t have the same density of the iPhone 4 and wouldn’t make much sense as an editing platform at present.

We’re looking forward, as many are, to playing with the new iMovie app, and we’ll of course give you a full review on June 24th.