Here’s the second part of my blog on the new iPhone 4; specifically…shooting, editing and uploading hi def video, all on the new phone. In my previous post I gave a review of what I liked (really liked!) about Apple’s new iPhone. Today, a quick look at what you can do on this phone, from a video perspective.

First of all, you’ll need to purchase the $4.99 iMovie app from the iTunes store. Once done, you’ll need to get familiar with what the app can and cannot do. Here’s a quick link to iMovie for iPhone 4 FAQ’s:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4174?viewlocale=en_US 

Get familiar with the five iMovie themes. The best way to see what they can do is to play with each of them. They all have preset titles which you can customize for open, middle and end titles, or not use at all, over your video; each theme has a music track which you can turn on or off (by clicking the gear icon at the front of your timeline), and each gives you control over transitions between each scene (a theme transition that is like an alpha wipe) or dissolves with predetermined lengths which you can pick from. You can also delete by dragging it from the timeline or double tapping it and selecting “Delete Clip” at the bottom of the pop up menu. Clips are added to the  timeline by shooting them directly from iMovie, or importing them from your iPhone Gallery. Both stills and video can be imported. The length of clips can be trimmed by touching a clip and dragging the yellow placeholders at the front and end of the clip. Double tapping the clip in the timeline brings up all the controls from Title Style, Location (where it was shot), and Audio (sound from each clip). You can also choose a music track from you iTunes on your iPhone. Some of your favorite purchased music may be protected and you will not be allowed to import it.

Once you’re happy with your edit, go to the main page of iMovie and click the upload icon in the bottom left corner. You’re given three export choices: 360P, 540P and 720P (the only one that’s hi def). Your movie is then compressed and placed as a QuickTime movie in your Photo Gallery’s Camera Roll. From here you can upload to YouTube or your MobileMe account, you can e-mail to a friend or send it as a MMS (multimedia messaging service) text message directly from your iPhone.

To show you the quality of my test video in true 720P hi def, I first synced my phone to my Mac Pro computer and then uploaded the full res, hi def video from there. AT&T is limiting bandwidth from the iPhone, so this ensured a HD file upload to YouTube. Let me know what you think. Here’s the link.

YouTube HD video link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hea8u5rJJQ

Written by Michael Murray