I recently traveled to France and England and used my iPhone 5s and the iMovie app to create a series of videos about the places I visited. I wanted to test the ease with which I could shoot and edit videos with my iPhone, and this trip provided that opportunity. The iMovie for iOS app has been improved and includes a variety of useful tools and options, many of which are easier to use than in previous versions. The ability to edit footage quickly with this app and produce a quality movie meant that I did not need to wait until I got back to the hotel and to my computer to edit. In most cases, I was able to edit the video on the fly as I was shooting the footage. I often had the video completely edited and ready to share by the time we finished touring for the day–much to the amazement of my traveling companions. By the end of the trip, I had created ten short videos that documented what we saw and did each day. I would never have accomplished this with a camera and desktop editing software, as that would have required me to sacrifice my evenings to download the files and then painstakingly review and edit the footage on my computer.

In any case, this experience showed me that with a little practice, it is incredibly easy and efficient to create a quality video with an iPhone and the iMovie app. As I pointed out in a previous post, it’s like having a film studio in your pocket. If you were doing field research, attending a conference, or just traveling as I was, this shoot and edit approach would be a sure-fire way to ensure a finished video product—as opposed to a bunch of random footage stored on a memory card.

Previous tutorials that I’ve created to show how to shoot and edit a science video on mobile devices used an earlier version of the iMovie app. I finally got around to redoing the tutorial with the current version (2.1.1) of iMovie for iOS–the version I used on this recent trip. This new tutorial uses footage I shot at the Natural History Museum in London and covers the basics of how to use iMovie to edit a video on an iPhone (direct link to video):