Edit Video on your iPhone. Seriously?
Monday, May 7, 2007 at 10:05AM 
I don't know how (or if—see comments below!) Walter Biscardi and Peter Wiggins got their hands on an iPhone to try this out, but they claim there's some kind of "lite" version of Final Cut Pro 6 that will run on and iPhone and allow cuts-only editing with the ProRes422 codec.
http://blogs.creativecow.net/node/174
I'll just pause for a minute while you collect yourself.
I knew the iPhone was going to have amazing potential for DV Rebels, but I did not expect this much, this soon. And as much as I might want it to be true, I'm not quite buying it.
Thanks to jwdenzel for posting the link on the Rebel Café! If you haven't checked it out lately it's becoming quite an active resource for filmmakers.
EDIT: So obviously this turned out to be a hoax. Touché guys, and as I commented below, if anything it makes it abundantly clear how enthusiastic people are about customizing the iPhone with mini-apps unique to their work and art. I hope someone somewhere is listening.
Reader Comments (15)
Looks obviously like a photoshop job to me. Nice try though.
I gotta admit, it does look a little fishy...
if thats not a drop shadow on the iphone I'll eat my hat.
You already can "edit" video with the Nokia N95, which can shoot 640*480 at 30fps.
It's limited of course, but look at the manual : http://shop.nokia.co.uk/invt/0027027
This phone is more a computer than a phone anyway.
The phone appears a little "flat" in that shot. Feels like a Photoshop job, but we'll see in June.
However much I want this to be true, the more I look at that, the more dodgy it looks. The scale's all wrong and it looks like a screen grab (cropped at the sides) of FCP stuck over the top.
Out of good will (sheer denial), I'd like to think that this is a comp put together due to poor photographic conditions of a genuine mini app rather than anything as. cruel and heartless as a prank
Even if the iPhone is a closed platform, you'll still be able to edit video via web applications like http://www.jumpcut.com
This speaks volumes about the unfulfilled desires of videofolk out there...we sure want an iPhone to be able to do that, but no amount of heel-clicking is gonna make that happen anytime this year, I'd say.
Also, I would take up the implied tech challenge there to really reinvent the interface in such a way that it supports quick cutting together on the small screen--the kind of thing a Baghdad correspondent would want to do in between ducking and covering.
Much simpler, lota poking and pinching and so on. The cuts only editor for the 21st century.
Ironically, I think that interface would resemble, well, iMovie more than FCP.
And Stu, please alert me (so I can awaken from my luddite stupor) when Motion or any node-based compositing is available on the iPhone!
No way. As someone who's lived many dog-years in Photoshop, I'd say this was a fake.
Even if you did want to edit video on a computer this size, doing it efficiently would require a total rethinking of the user interface. Using FCP would be kinda difficult, don't you think? And good luck with only 8GB.
FCP on my iPhone? No thanks - but more iPhone in my FCP, that could be interesting! Imagine editing video with a multi-touch screen, and a re-thought UI, and we just a few steps away from editing Minority Report style.
click on the photo and read the blog entries on the authors blog. It's a joke they pulled just to see how long it would take to sweep across the net.
It was a joke. Walter just admitted it on the site.
Before he posted it he wondered how fast it would spread. Not long.
I'd be more interested in seeing its use as a videoscope as has been mentioned before on this blog (or was it in the rebel cafe?). Better that than trying to edit on an iPhone. That would seem more useful to me. Also, Stu's link to the video iPod as a means of providing timecode sync for music vids seems like a more useful tool.
Touché Walter. I guess it shows how much we'd like the "smart phone" moniker to mean that we could install custom software on the iPhone!
Whether this is true, it raises the big problem with the iPhone: it's not generally open to third-party applicationsl, severely _limiting_ its potential.
Why are so many people interested in editing video on a PHONE?