Pocket Spielbergs: the 12 best video editing apps for mobile

No-one wants to see a 30-minute video of your cat being mildly amusing; and even that 60-second comedy classic Drunken Mate Falls Off Chair is too long.

But cut out the boring bits, drop in some transitions and add a soundtrack, and you’ve got social media gold. Possibly.

So, whether you’re a budding Hollywood director armed with a smartphone, or just someone who wants to make an Instagram clip look more Instagrammy, grab some of these editors and get cracking on your masterpiece. After all, you’ve only another 29-and-a-half minutes to chop out!

IMOVIE

Considered a benchmark iOS release, and impressively similar to the Mac desktop version, iMovie should be on every iOS device. The app makes it ridiculously easy to splice together shot footage, but there’s a lot more to it than that.

You can use it to add titles, music, voiceovers and photos to your work of art – and if you want to cheese it up, take your pick from a bunch of TV-style templates and movie trailer themes. With recent Apple hardware, it’ll even deftly deal with 4K.

CLIPS

Designed for speed and aimed at the social media generation, Clips dumps traditional timelines, titles and the like, for something more immediate.

You record clips in-app or import existing movies by ‘recording’ them into the Clips square viewport, rearrange thumbnails, slather everything in effects, and hurl the result at your network of choice.

Live Titles and animated posters add further creative scope – and if you’ve an iPhone X, Selfie Scenes can make it look like you’re aboard a Star Wars spaceship doing your best (i.e. worst) Vader impression.

POWERDIRECTOR

Android often ends up second-best when it comes to creative fare, but that’s not the case with video. PowerDirector in many ways echoes iMovie, providing a user-friendly but powerful editor.

Clips can quickly be arranged and trimmed, titles can be added, and you get a decent set of transitions to experiment with. However, you’ll have to pay a monthly subscription to rid your movies of watermarks and export at up to 4K.

LUMAFUSION

While iMovie is great at what it does, it’s ultimately geared towards casual use. If you want to take things to the next level, try LumaFusion.

Designed for efficiency, and aimed at mobile journalists and filmmakers, the app includes multi-track editing with realtime preview, superb (and occasionally bonkers) animation, effects and transitions, and a powerful titler.

It’s the closest you’ll get to desktop-style video-editing app on your iPad or iPhone.

KINEMASTER

One of the most impressive things about this Android and iOS video editor is that it’s so simple to use – even on quite a small smartphone.

It uses screen space remarkably well, making it a cinch to arrange your clips, add additional layers (captions, images, and even ‘handwriting’), quickly import extra footage and play around with effects.

But like PowerDirector, it’s a pity the developer saddled the app with a restrictive subscription payment model rather than a one-off cost: the monthly subscription will set you back $4.99, or you can get a year for $39.99.

VIDEOGRADE

O Brother, Where Art Thou? has a lot to answer for, given that most modern Hollywood blockbusters are now colour-graded to within an inch of their lives. Still, as VideoGrade proves, such tools can perform magic on mundane clips – when in the right hands.

Load up a video and you can radically transform how it looks by using adjustment sliders, bring new life to ancient footage with careful use of effects, or simply remove a colour cast from an otherwise perfect shot. Whatever you go for, just avoid ending up with teal and orange, eh?

Quik

Formerly known as Replay, Quik was primarily designed for Instagrammers, but is suitable for anyone with pics and videos sloshing about on their iOS device. Suitably, it’s all about creating videos — fast. You decide on a selection, pick a theme and — BAM! — there’s your masterpiece.

You can make a few tweaks — style, pace, font, titles, filters and trims. For the most part, though, this is all about letting an app take the strain, turning a pile of photos into a promo, or random baby or pet videos into something guaranteed to make everyone blub.

Or, if you’re feeling particularly lazy, just wait for the app to compile a video on your behalf (which it does every week) and take all the credit.

LumaFX

If you fancy just having the bits of LumaFusion for adding mad effects or making speedy changes to videos, that’s LumaFX.

This app’s all about fixing single clips, whether you were holding your iPhone wrong (meaning everything plays sideways), or your footage ended up with a colour cast that makes everyone look like they’re about to vomit.

With a few taps, LumaFX lets you flip, reorient and rotate footage, adjust its speed and aspect ratio, and apply all manner of effects. Whether you want to subtly adjust contrast and shadows or transform a home movie into a deranged 1970s Eastern European animation, LumaFX is money well-spent. Unless you already own LumaFusion, obviously.

Splice

Given its impressive feature-set, you might sit down with Splice and wonder what the catch is. This entirely free (and ad-free) app enables you to import and arrange clips, each of which can be individually edited.

You can add text, transitions, and filters; speed can be adjusted; and there are multiple audio tracks (including one for voiceovers).

Destructive trimming within clip edits is the only real niggle — trims and cuts can subsequently all be removed from edited footage with a single tap, but this workflow lacks the flexibility needed for experimentation. Otherwise Splice is great for quickly editing movies on your iPhone.

Vue

When originally released, Vue decided you should get precisely six seconds of fame, through a three-shot montage that you could filter and adjust with all manner of sliders and buttons.

The app’s now a mite more flexible: you can import existing video, and movies can last up to 180 seconds (although it prefers ten second miniature masterpieces split between four clips).

This makes it a great editor for people who want a razor-sharp, super-short video with tight transitions, effects, and carefully tweaked levels.

Adobe Premiere Clip

With Premiere’s pedigree on the desktop, it’s a bit odd to see the name used on mobile for such a comparatively simple product. But Premiere Clip gives you a straightforward means of arranging clips and exporting the result.

It’s designed for speed, so isn’t particularly feature-rich, but it’s a decent download for anyone heavily immersed in Creative Cloud — or Android owners wanting something quick, simple and free. (iOS owners should instead first check out the superior Splice, above.)

Magistro

This app comes across like an automated editor for anyone who considers using Replay a bit much effort. Point Magistro at a bunch of images and photos, pick a theme and some music, and then have a cup of tea. When you’re done, Magistro will be too, and you’ll have a highly animated short, based on the content you provided. For free, movies are limited to a minute long. Pay for premium and you can create longer movies with more clips, and get unlimited downloads. If you only want to save the odd movie, you can do so for free, but they’ll come with watermarks.