With hundreds of video editing apps to choose from – which one is best for parents looking to create family films quickly
What is the best editing app for iPhone? Where do you begin if there are thousands in the App Store? And which is best for parents that just want to make better films of their family using their iPhone?
Read on and we’ll answer your questions – including giving our recommendation for the best video editing app for iPhone in 2021…
If you search for “Video editing” on the App Store there are literally hundreds of apps that come up. Some free, some not free, and some that look free until you actually download it, get all the way through an edit and then find out that you have to pay for it to export properly!
So which is the best video editing app for iPhone in 2021 if you’re a parent looking to make better films of your family?
First – and most importantly – what criteria am I using to judge this on?
1: Ease of Use. As a parent, having something that is easy to use is a must. You need to be able to do edit quickly and efficiently, whilst still getting the job done.
2: Cost. Whilst I think paying a bit of money on an app is totally worth it – do you really want to be paying £120 a year for the privilege?
3: Features. Does the app give you all that you need to create the films you want to make?
In the running I’ve chosen 4 of my favourites.
Starting with iMovie – It definitely has it’s benefits:
1: It’s free.
2: It’s relatively intuitive to get started.
But is it the best video editing app on the iPhone right now?
When you first start out editing there’s a bit of a learning curve and iMovie is a very simple program to get started with.
If all you want to do is stick a few clips together then it does the job. The music that is bundled in free with the app is a great feature and it does a really nice job of timing music to fit the clips so you don’t need to faff around cutting it down.
I like the fact that you can detach the audio from the video and extend it and add fades to each end. (You probably won’t use that feature straight away – but it’s nice to have and is missing from some fo the other apps in this review.
However – it falls down on a few key areas…
My biggest bug with iMovie is that it automatically adds a cross dissolve transition between all clips. You then have to go through and manually switch it to ‘none’ to turn them all off. (Rarely should you be using transitions in the films that you make – but that’s a whole other blog post I could write on that) It’s not difficult to turn them off – but it all adds time and as a parent – time is often short.
It’s limited on colour grading features. You can add some filters – but most of them just look cheap and overdone. Sometimes less is more so don’t go crazy on filters.
It’s a great app to get started with. It’s relatively easy to use. The fact that it’s free is ideal. BUT – when you start editing more regularly – there are a number of things in there that you will find frustrating that just take up time. You’ll outgrow it quite quickly.
Inshot is a fairly simple editing platform – however there are some fairly advanced things that it can do beyond the basics. It’s perhaps not as intuitive as iMovie – but with the added features that’s kind of to be expected.
You can edit in different formats (square, 16:9, 9:16) Though for most family films I’d recommend sticking to the 16:9 landscape format. And once you’ve set that once – it should default to that the next time.
Adding multiple clips to start with is simple and it’s relatively straight forward trimming them down. The thing I love about Inshot is that each time you add a filter, or change the volume on a clip, you have the option to either apply just to that clip, or you can apply to all clips. This can save you a bunch of time not having to copy and paste filters or settings from one clip to another.
Cost of the app – you can get started for free. Initially when you try and export it there will be a watermark on the video – however it gives you the option of watching an advert to remove that. So it’s effectively free and you only have to watch through about 7 seconds of the ads before you can skip through.
The paid versions add a few more features, like different filters etc – but you can get started without those.
There’s a good selection of music that you can add to your films for free which is great as music really helps to set a mood in a film.
Where the app falls down is that you only have the ability to add one video track – so clips have to be used sequentially. For most things that’s fine – however if you’re making a film of a birthday for example, and you have recorded everyone singing the song, I’ll often have the singing playing underneath and add in some other cutaways over the top (close ups of the cake and candles etc) but you can’t do that in Inshot.
A great app for putting together quick edits that don’t require anything too complicated in the editing. The the number of music options is well worth exploring. Copying effects to all clips is great.
But – a lot of the features of Inshot are more useful if you’re using it as a business tool and are making videos with lost of titles and emojis to grab attention rather than just using it to make family films.
Definitely worth downloading and using the free version – Not sure the paid version will benefit most parents.
LumaFusion is the first one our list that is a true ‘multi-track’ video editor. That means that you can stack up to 6 clips on top of each other using the audio from one and the image from another for example. You can also add up to 6 layers of audio or music too. Is 6 tracks of video and audio necessary? Not often – but I regularly find myself using at least 3 audio tracks in order to smooth out the audio from one clip to the next or use bits of sound from one clip over another.
Lumafusion pretty much has every feature you could ask for in an editing platform – and it blows my mind what they have packed into a mobile editing app. For the most part all of the other apps have little quirks and things that you have to work around or that they simply cannot do. I can’t think of much that Lumafusion can’t do – its more likely that the frustrations come through not knowing how to get it to do the things that it can do. But certainly the basics are still fairly straight forward to learn like most of that apps in here.
The cost of the app is currently £28.99 on the App Store, but it has the benefit of being a one time payment. Whereas upgrading in Inshot for example will cost nearer to £40 per year. And when you consider that it has many of the features available in high end desktop computer programs that cost hundreds – it’s a bargain. Is it worth it for a parent who’s making just the odd video here or there? I’d say 7/10 times you can probably do most things in the other apps. Lumafusion covers the rest.
Usability – there’s perhaps a steeper learning curve in the beginning to get started using LumaFusion, but once you know your way around the app – you can do pretty much anything with it. It costs a little more than we’re used to paying for apps on a phone. A lot of the features might go unused in most films – but there’s certainly times where what you want to do cannot be done in most of the other apps – but will be possible in LumaFusion.
Well worth the upgrade if you can get over the early learning curve.
This app was a real surprise when I started using it. Putting clips onto a timeline and trimming them down to length is super quick as it has a feature called ‘ripple edits’. That basically means that you put the playhead where you want a clip to start or finish and with the click of a button it will remove what comes before it and shuffle everything along – whereas on some other apps you either have to drag a slider across which can get fiddly on such a small screen, or you split a clip and then manually delete the portion you don’t want.
As well as assembling films quickly – there’s also a whole host of other features that are often only seen in higher end desktop editing programs. One is adjustment layers.
Without going into too much detail that basically means that whatever you apply to that adjustment layer will be applied to all the clips below (or in this apps case above). So you can add a filter or effect and it will be applied to all clips in your film. If you don’t like it you only need to change it on that one adjustment layer rather than having to go through and change it on everything.
The audio waveforms (or visual representation of the sound) are overlaid over the video which is great if your video has sound and dialogue that you’re looking to focus on and make edits around.
The app is free to download – and you can edit and export projects without watermarks. Some of the features are locked but the app is only £9.99 to purchase with a one time payment. Definitely worth the upgrade to add things like the adjustment layers.
You can resize clips with ease and crop and zoom in which you can’t in Inshot or iMovie very easily. So there’s a lot of freedom and flexibility to get things looking how you want them.
You can sort of add multiple layers of clips. So you can have the audio from one clip and the video from another -but if I’m honest – it gets a little clunky at that stage – so at the minute I’d stick just to basic sequential edits.
Definitely a great one to get started and can actually be used by beginners all the way through to advanced editors. Initially it can be a bit of a pain clicking around the app and wondering where different elements are that you’re trying to use – but once you get your head around it you can get beyond those quirks. Definitely one to download and I’d certainly be happy to upgrade to the full version too.
If you sign up to watch the 6 tips training then I send out a video overview to help get you started editing using VLLO
There are some very capable apps out there that didn’t make the final shortlist. Adobe Premiere Rush is a great program, not quite as feature rich as LumaFusion but is one of the few proper multitrack editors available on the phone. It has the benefit of being available on Android too. But the cost of £9.99 per month makes it far too expensive for a parent that is just doing this as a hobby – and still only has half the features of LumaFusion. The one reason why I think it is worth a mention is that it comes free with other adobe packages – so if you are already using something like Adobe Photoshop on a Creative Cloud subscription – you might already have access to Rush for free. In which case It’s definitely worth a look at.
If I could only choose 1 – it would have to be LumaFusion – for the simple fact that it can do pretty much everything that you could possible every wish in an editing app. Whilst the learning curve might be a little steeper – there are things that you can do that you simply cannot do in any of the other apps. A very close second is VLLO. For speedy edits it is super quick. The learning curve is similar to iMovie and Inshot – but you can go a little further before getting frustrated by the limitations of the program. The app can get a little fussy but hey.
Give them a try and let me know which is your favourite!
Also – if you haven’t watched my free 6 tips training so that you can start making films of your family fast – then you can get access to that here:
==>> Take me to the Free 6 Tips Training <<==
After watching the training I’ll also send you an video to get you started editing in minutes too…