On Thursday of last week, Josh and I waited in line for almost 5 hours to be one of the first in America to own a brand new iPhone 4.  I was excited about many of the new features including Face Time (video chatting) and Multi-tasking.  But the most surprising new addition to this new iPhone is its ability to shoot and edit HD video.

Apple released iMovie for the iPhone the same day the new phone was released.  At first I was a scoffer.  For $4.99, how could this app be useful as a tool to cut video?  It had to be a gimmick, right?

Wrong!

Over the weekend, my brother, sister-in-law, nephew, and I took an overnight trip to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks and I thought this would be a perfect chance to put the new iPhone through it’s paces.  And boy did I.  I was shooting pictures and video almost the entire time.  (The battery life is surprisingly good.)

(Check out the photo quality.  This one looks like a Bob Ross painting.)

Because we spent a fair amount of time in the car traveling to and from the parks plus travel between them, I was able to start editing the footage right away and I’d like to share my thoughts on the iPhone as an editing suite.

iMovie for iPhone allows you to cut video determining the ins and outs with a fair amount of precision.  You can add a cross dissolve between the clips and determine the length of the cross dissolve.  You can also decide NOT to use a dissolve.

iMovie gives you a few different options for adding titles.   You select a theme that determines the overall look of the titles and can then choose from a few different styles within that theme for different kinds of titles.  Unfortunately, you can not easily create a full screen title.  I got around this point by creating a blank note and then typing up what I wanted the title to say and then taking a screen grab.

iMovie allows you to insert video, photos, and music all from your iPhone.  Any song from your iTunes can be inserted underneath the video track (with a few limitations.)  Also, you can select on the video track whether you want the selected video clip’s audio track to be on or off.  I love that you can determine that on a clip by clip basis rather than selecting all on or all off.  One downside to the music track is that you can’t add more music if the song ends.  And if you want to cross fade to another song, you can’t.

Overall, I’m VERY pleased with iMovie for iPhone and I’m excited to see what updates they release for the app.

Below you can see the videos that I cut for the trip.  The downside to uploading from your iPhone 4 is that it doesn’t send HD video to Youtube.  I hope they fix that.  Check them out -

Part 1 of our trip video:

Part 2 of our trip video:

What are you waiting for?  Go out and get the iPhone 4!  And for you Blackberry users – what cool things can your phone do?