During the 2010 WWDC Keynote presentation, a demo of iMovie for iPhone impressed the audience. Being able to edit HD videos right on the iPhone 4 appeared simple and seamless, making it one of the much anticipated iPhone apps. However, we did not hear a lot of iMovie details from Apple. That is until TidBITS was able to get some more information from their Apple sources.
- iMovie for iPhone will require the iPhone 4, and not be available for the iPhone 3GS. Handling video and creating real-time transitions needs the power of the iPhone 4’s A4 processor.
- Projects edited on the phone cannot “currently” be transferred to iMovie on the Mac for further editing; projects stay on the phone. (The edited movies can be exported or synced to iTunes, however.)
- Video clips can be recorded directly within iMovie for iPhone or come from the Camera Roll (clips previously shot using the phone’s built-in camera). Based on how the Camera Roll works, I suspect it may also be possible to work with clips you’ve shot elsewhere by emailing them from your computer to the phone, then saving the attachment to the Camera Roll. The clips would need to be properly formatted as H.264 videos (and without having the software or an iPhone 4 to test, I don’t know which specifications that entails).
- iMovie for iPhone is scheduled to ship June 24th to coincide with the launch of the iPhone 4.
- The app is currently for the iPhone 4 only, and won’t run on the iPad. I suspect the app is tailored to the iPhone 4’s higher-density screen, and therefore wouldn’t work within the iPad’s pixel-doubled compatibility mode. (I’d be very surprised if an iMovie for iPad version doesn’t appear at some point, possibly with the release of iOS 4 for the iPad in a few months.)
So the biggest point from above is that iMovie will be limited to the iPhone 4 due to the processor requirements. I’m sure the jailbreak community will figure out a way to bypass this and implement iMovie on the iPhone 3GS. Even if that does happen, I’m not sure how well iMovie will run though.
Are you looking forward to trying out iMovie for iPhone?
[TidBITS]
