ProVideo Coalition.com: the EDITBLOG on PVC by Scott Simmons

Okay, let’s get one thing straight about the new Apple iPhone 3G S ... it can’t edit the video it shoots. What it can do is trim the beginning and end of each and every clip. That may just be semantics talking but I’ve seen lots of stuff on the Interweb saying that you can edit the video that you shoot on the iPhone ... to me editing means that you can actually join two separate clips into one. You can’t do this on the iPhone 3G S. But you indeed can trim your clips to shave off unwanted frames at the head and the tail. It’s a really cool thing to be able to do, especially if you are running low on storage space on the phone. And considering you have to tap the start/stop button on the touch screen (as opposed to say a hard button on the side) you are likely to have some slop at the head and tail as you begin a shot.

When you play back a clip you have a little filmstrip at the top of the screen with a small playhead. If you want to trim a clip you just tap and drag the handles at the beginning or end of the filmstrip. The handles turn yellow as you adjust them and the screen updates as you trim. When you are happy tap the trim button and you have a shorter clip, space saved.

This is a nice feature. I’m not sure if in-camera trimming is available on other video shooting phones (or micro camcorders like the Flip) or not, but if not then you can bet they will add that in the future. It seems only natural that Apple will add a most rudimentary way to actually edit and join a few trimmed clips together with some update in the future. Winston brought up a good point on Twitter that with all the applications available for the phone it’s a no-brainer that someone will write one very soon. In fact there’s no telling what kinds of video manipulation apps are in the works. With the ability to upload video clips directly to YouTube or MobileMe (not to mention direct email) then a basic editing / clip joining function would be a godsend for the journalist in the field or the dad on the beach. Of course bandwidth is always an issue when sending video around. When I tried to email a minute long clip I got this message:

The iPhone didn’t want to email a video longer than 47 seconds and 4.5 megs as that’s the default trim length it gave me. But it did upload the whole minute long clip to MobileMe. It compresses these videos a bit further down to 480x360.

I’ve never had a micro video camera like this before. All of my casual video shooting is with my HV20 rig with GT35Pro lens adapter so this concept of always having a video camera available is new in my mind. I took the iPhone 3G S out for a stroll around the neighborhood this morning just to grab a few shots and see what the video looks like.

Video is recorded at VGA resolution. It’s 640x480 when holding the phone in landscape orientation but it’s 480x640, like a long rectangle, when holding it portrait style. That will make for some funky/fun video. The phone is supposed to shoot at 30 frames per second but I found that often it will capture less. You can see from the Final Cut Pro bin below that FCP is see the fps on a lot of the clips at odd frame rates like 21, 19, or 23 frames per second:

It seems that the less light you have in your surroundings then the less and more sporadic the frame rates were. All this tech talk is just for information purposes only. This is a cell phone shooting video so at this point in technology we can’t expect too much out of it. From just playing with the iPhone 3G S for a couple of days I can say that the video is shoots is great for what you might do with it - capturing the moment; be it fun with friends or the occasional natural disaster to send over to CNN. Imagine how much on the scene video coverage the world will now get with millions and millions of these phones out in people’s hands. If you want more than that, better resolution, better audio, better color space, then get a real camera. I’m going to enjoy it for what it is.

Next, let’s see some actual video from this phone

FYI - there’s 5 QuickTime videos embeded in the next page between 5 megs and 8 megs. May take time to load on slower connections. But they are actually viewable on an iPhone!

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It’s normal for such devices to capture fewer frames in low light conditions. The same happens on Android phones. Not sure about Nokia phones, haven’t tried (although I have a bunch of them here, since I used to work as a tech journalist).

Speaking about the Nokia phones, they have had very good quality VGA video for years now. Originally only high-end models, but now pretty much most of them do. This official music video of a popular UK artist was shot with one of these Nokia phones, the N93: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsxCPMpRRK8
I interviewed the director back then too, as I was fascinated by the idea of using the worst possible tool to create something outstanding: http://tuxtops.com/node/1175 (check the “making of” video linked from there too).

Posted by Eugenia on 06/20 at 06:09 PM

Heh! Now that I am watching back that music video, I notice that Nokia does a very good job on making sure that exposure doesn’t jump abruptly! Some of these shots in the video with other phones, would probably look terrible because of the automatic exposure changes. :o

Posted by Eugenia on 06/20 at 06:14 PM

You’re right - it’s trimming, not editing. That’s a distinction that a lot of people don’t understand. I once applied for an “editing” job but it wasn’t until I got to the interview that I realized that all they wanted me to do was trim clips for 10% of the time and then do paperwork for the other 90%!

Posted by Jon Chappell on 06/21 at 03:42 AM

So Jon ... are you going to write us an iPhone video editing app?

Posted by Scott Simmons on 06/21 at 07:09 AM

Perhaps… wait and see

Posted by Jon Chappell on 06/21 at 09:22 AM

It is not easy—if possible at all—to write a video editing app on the iPhone (or any other smartphone in the market today—including Google’s Android). To do that you need hooks to the media API/codecs that are not public, and you need to allocate a lot of resources in a way that the phone won’t let you do that.

And I am just talking about the basic of the operations: trim, cut, put together, add an music track, export. If you just want to “fake it”, like Apple does right now, sure, it’s possible. But if you want to create something basic and yet useful, you would need to start working for Apple and not as a third party developer, in order to get access to APIs and libraries that are not public.

Now, you are probably asking “and how do you know that?”. Let’s just say that I have already discussed the possibilities with developers who have expressed an interest for such a mobile video editing project.

I am not saying that future versions of the various OS/SDKs won’t allow for such a complex project, but for now, it’s kind of a pipe dream. Video editing apps are more complex than they seem, and this is why most editors are so easy to crash (I am not pointing fingers, they ALL crash easily), and the Linux community after almost 20 years still hasn’t have a single free editor that’s actually truly useful and doesn’t crash every 3 minutes. There are those who say that writing a good video editing app is more complex than recreating a project like Firefox…

Posted by Eugenia on 06/21 at 01:28 PM

Perhaps I should have clarified that I have no intention whatsoever of making an iPhone video editing application…

Posted by Jon Chappell on 06/21 at 02:15 PM

Yea I don’t know if there will ever be any iPhone editing apps or not nor do I know how difficult or easy it would be to create one. That’s some interesting insight Eugenia, thanks for the comment.

Will all the extremely wide variety of apps available right now though I would bet a pretty penny that someone will at least come up with a way to take the trimmed video clips that sit on your phone and string them together in a particular order. That would be the first step. If a 3rd party app can access photos then I’m sure they could also access video clips sitting on the phone right? I think that simple kind of app will be coming around soon.

Posted by Scott Simmons on 06/21 at 03:34 PM

I downloaded the Family Guy app today from the iTunes App store. Being a fan, I couldn’t resist. It consists of a bunch of clips arranged in various order. What’s interesting however, is that you can create your own order of clips to be shown. You’re basically editing on the iPhone.

The top row is a list of all the clips to choose from, and the bottom row is your timeline that you can then arrange, and rearrange. Imagine taking the current ability of the iPhone, to shoot and trim video clips. Then add this functionality that one app already has. You now have a point and shoot, and editing device all in one. Upload to your favorite news, Facebook, and likely twitter, and what you’re saying is real with editing.

It’s coming…be prepared.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 06/22 at 10:27 AM

A better idea for embedding multiple Quicktime movies in the same page is to use single frame movies as poster frames.

This way, your viewers’ browsers don’t begin downloading all the movies at once, they can choose and click to start the movie playing (easier on your server too .

DV Kitchen encodes, uploads, and writes all the code for you so all you have to do is copy and paste it into your Expression Engine post.

The movie on this page demonstrates both default poster frame and custom poster frame code generation:

http://www.dvcreators.net/dv-kitchen-20/

Posted by Josh Mellicker from DVcreators.net on 06/23 at 06:03 PM

Josh, I like that. Unfortunately I don’t run how all this is setup but maybe the powers-that-be will check it out. Thanks for the link.

Posted by Scott Simmons on 06/23 at 06:34 PM

Hi Scott, oops, I forgot to mention you can also republish already uploaded clips in a player of your choice - QT with poster frame, or Flash player with many skin choices.

Posted by Josh Mellicker from DVcreators.net on 06/23 at 06:39 PM

That song is awesome! I Googled the lyrics and found The Features. Thanks for sharing. Interesting post as well.

Posted by Eric Granata on 06/26 at 12:01 PM

Eric, check out their latest disc Some Kind of Salvation ... by far my favorite release of last year.

Posted by Scott Simmons on 06/26 at 12:46 PM

FYI, here is a Pro Video Coalition review of DV Kitchen by Alan Tepper:

http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/atepper/dvkitchen_has_become_a_must_have_video_encoding_publishing_tool/

Posted by Josh Mellicker from DVcreators.net on 06/26 at 05:09 PM

iPhone video is nice to have, but can I make a living with it?

Posted by DanConklin on 07/01 at 03:19 PM

@ Intervention Center:

You are correct. We covered one of them recently:

http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/ssimmons/story/reeldirector_lets_the_iphone_3gs_really_edit_video1/

Are you aware of others? If so what are they? Thanks.

Posted by Scott Simmons on 11/16 at 09:56 AM

@ Scott - I was also referring to ReelDirector which also happened to be in the link you gave. I use this to tweak some videos I take from my iPhone. ReelDirector is a handy and reliable tool in my book as well.

Posted by GerryG on 11/23 at 12:08 PM

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The iPhone 3G S can’t really EDIT video!