QuickAdvice: Have the Power of Hollywood on Your iPhone with Splice
Splice ($1.99) by Path 36, LLC is a video editor for your iPhone 3GS / iPhone 4 that is packed full of features.
The app will allow you to create projects in either Portrait or Landscape orientation (for the final video result). You can add multiple clips and photos in a single project. The process of adding video clips and photos in a project seems pretty decent, although video clips have to be compressed before it goes in the project. The compression process always takes a bit, depending on how long the original clip is. Importing a photo is much faster, and you can change the duration of how long the photo stays on, up to 10 seconds.
If you change your mind about the order of your clips, it's easy to reorder them. Simply tap and hold, then drag it to the position you want. Tapping a specific clip will also bring up several options, including: trimming the original clip, making a copy, or deleting it. Once the meat of the project (aka video clips and photos) is set, then it's time to move on to the other fun stuff.
Transitions and titles can also be added to a video, although at the moment these seem to be very basic. There are only six transitions available in Splice currently, and adding a title only results in a black screen with plain white text on it. There's nothing fancy like in iMovie for iPhone. Hopefully there can be more added to this category in the future.
There is a tab above the clips that displays 'Video' and 'Audio'. The next step is 'Audio.' Tapping it will bring you to the next screen, where you can import a soundtrack from either the Splice music library or your entire iPod library. The imported music track will last as long as the video, so if the video is set for 1 minute and 30 seconds, the song will only play for 1 minute and 30 seconds. If you have a longer video, you can add more audio tracks.
Sound effects can also be added to the video, although you are just limited to what is in the Splice library. While it's a decent selection of sound effects, it would have been better if you could add your own (although maybe the process of having to put it into iTunes and all that may be out of the way). The sound effects will be in the very beginning of the video when you import it, but you can tap and hold it to drag it to any point in the video.
Finally, another neat thing that you can do as far as audio in a project is add a voiceover. Splice will allow you to record over the audio of the video, so if you have a great narrating voice and want it to be heard, there's an app for that (this line will never get old).
The last thing to do before you export your project is to add a border, or not, it's really up to you. There's six to choose from, and each one adds a unique and distinctive look that is guaranteed to give your video a bit of flair.
Now it's time to export. Unfortunately, even on an iPhone 4, the max resolution output is High at 640 x 480. There's no HD output option (720p). Hopefully, a future update will add HD resolution for exporting. But even at high resolution, the end result is pretty nice looking. The rendering will take a couple of minutes, depending on how long the duration of your project is.
Splice has some flexibility with allowing the user to feel like a Hollywood director with it's easy-to-use interface, although there are still bits of the app that need work. Such as when you import clips, the photo albums will be displayed in portrait mode when the entire app is set in landscape. There also needs to be more transitions and options for titles other than what it currently has - lack of real flair like in iMovie or ReelDirector. The option for HD video like in iMovie needs to be included as well for all iPhone 4 owners.
But really, for $1.99, this app is great for the price when compared to the competition - iMove is $4.99 and ReelDirector is $3.99 (normally $7.99 but it's on sale in celebration of their new app).
With just a couple of updates addressing current issues, this app could be a real strong contender in terms of fully featured video editing apps.
