The Digital Director Experience: Video Editing Fundamentals

I’ve been a reluctant iPad convert, but it’s slowly pushed out my laptop over the last year. I now rarely use my PC for anything other than video editing. And it’s not just the iPad, but the apps themselves that make the iPad a real alternative to using a PC. The apps often outperform their bloated PC counterpart, and at a price that suits almost anyone’s budget. So could I do without my PC? Is there an app that can compete with a PC for video editing? Could an app take a fresh approach to editing?

I’ve found two apps that fit the bill in the Apple store. Both cost less than £10 and both from software developers with a history in video editing - iMove and Avid Studio. It certainly bodes well for an early grave for my laptop.

If you’ve ever edited video before, you’ll instantly recognise both iMovie and Avid Studio. They both follow the classic, tried and tested layout. There’s a file viewer for clip selection, the monitor window and a timeline which fills the bottom half of the screen. So there’s not really any innovation here. In fact the only real difference is the way you scrub the timeline. Instead of moving the timeline marker, you move the timeline itself.

It’s a similar story with just about every feature. Put simply, Avid Studio does a reasonable job attempting to bring sophisticated editing to the iPad, but let itself down with a clunky interface. iMovie tries harder to adapt to the iPad market, bringing the ease of editing created in the apps bigger mac brother, but there’s one fundamental issue.

These apps assume you’ll be editing video you’ve captured on an iPad or iPhone - iMovie even has a video record function. And there’s no practical way of transferring footage from a separate camcorder. iMovie’s a perfect accompaniment to the new iPad’s camera (the second generation iPad’s camera leaves a lot to be desired), and the iPad works surprisingly well as a camcorder.

So if you want to knock together a simple edit, iMovie is a great tool. But if you’re looking to for anything more, don’t sell your PC just yet.