Editing in iMovie on Mac

Turn your long rambling clips into a slickly-edited story

Your iPhone will soon become full of video clips that you can find quickly in the iPhone Photos app by tapping on Albums and scrolling down to Videos.

Tap to view a clip. You can then tap Edit to apply the same editing tools that you’d use to adjust a photo’s colours and tones to a clip. In addition, Photo’s video-editing tools enable you to drag trim handles at the start and end of a clip to cut to the best bit. This process also makes the clip shorter and easier to upload if you want to share it to social media. After editing a single clip, tap

Done, choose ‘Save Video as New Clip’, then tap Share to share it via Mail, Instagram, and so on. Sharing a single short clip from the Photos app is fine, but you can do so much more with your valuable video assets by using iMovie to turn a collection of individual clips into a professional-looking story, complete with titles, transitions and music.

Gather your clips

iMovie is Apple’s free NLE (non-linear editor), that enables you to pop clips into a timeline, trim their duration and swap their running order (hence the term non-linear) to tell a story. You should have iMovie as a built-in app on your iPhone (if you don’t have it, download it for free via the App Store.) Editing clips on the iOS version of iMovie is straightforward, but the macOS version has extra tools (such as ways to improve problems with audio tracks), and you have more screen space to work in on an iMac or MacBook.

On these pages, we’ll explain how to transfer clips from iPhone to Mac, and how to use iMovie’s basic non-linear editing tools to create a tightly edited and smooth-flowing sequence to share with family and friends. We’ll then explore more expert techniques on p68.