Technical Difficulties Redux

This week’s Swan Song video was edited through a different video editing program, Pinnacle Studio Pro for the iPad. You shouldn’t be able to tell that it was edited in a different app aside from the lack of audio glitches, and that’s a good thing.

What isn’t so good is that while it is more reliable than iMovie when it comes to having weird glitches show up in the finished product, it is significantly more clunky to use. iMovie had built in support for document providers, an open way for apps to pull down files from any cloud service that builds a provider into their app. This was super convenient, because if your files are on the home network, you can use specific document providers to do so quickly instead of wastefully uploading everything to the cloud and then downloading it back. Pinnacle does not support document providers, instead deciding to pick and choose which cloud services they want to integrate into their app. There are still ways to import content from unsupported services’ apps into Pinnacle but it is fiddly and the user media directory sometimes doesn’t refresh, making you have to kill and relaunch the app for it to update.

The feature set differs a lot between iMovie and Pinnacle as well. iMovie has built-in support for overlays, picture-in-picture, and B-roll type stuff. It’s really hard to discover, but it’s definitely in there. Pinnacle has none of that, which is a bummer, as I had been looking forward to integrating more of that stuff down the line. Instead, Pinnacle has much more variety in transitions and richer support for custom titles. iMovie is much more limited on that front, since they mostly expect you to choose one of the preset themes and deal with what you’re given.

In the end, I’ll always prioritize my own inconvenience during editing to having a glitchy output, but these tradeoffs are kind of unfortunate. I also decided to check out GoPro’s video editing app Splice this week after Luc-Olivier mentioned it on our podcast. Unfortunately, Splice doesn’t let you import audio from any means other than music from your iTunes library or directly over the microphone. Voiceovers for my videos are recorded separately, edited in Ferrite, and then imported into the video editor, so that wouldn’t work in this case. That’s too bad since Splice is closer to iMovie in terms of user-friendliness, and while barebones, it would be able to get the job done most of the time if I could just import audio from elsewhere.

So yeah, I haven’t found an iOS video editing app I’m satisfied with but I’ll keep looking.