Oliver Bryant Photography - Blog

I have recently been spending more time using my 70-300mm Tamron Lens and during this process I’ve been able to capture close-up shots of bees.

While this has been very cool for people to see I wanted to upload a video to instagram showcasing the detail of the Bees up close in editing i couldn’t believe the detail of the bees but I wanted to also show the original composition. To achieve this I needed to use video editing software. Historically I would have booted up a Laptop, launch Adobe Premier and then edit the video but I decided to set myself a small challenge to edit a video only using my smartphone.

At the moment a lot of the video editing software packages available for Mobile are “AI enabled” but I wanted to have the freedom and creative control so I opted to go for “LumaFusion”, the app was a one time purchase of £29.99 and is available from iOS and Android. I should state LumaFusion isn’t paying me to write about this app. I decided to write about it because I wanted to share with you my experience of editing using on my phone.

An example of how the editing interface works

It took a while to get used to editing the videos. In iMovie on iOS you pinch zoom on the clip to crop but in LumaFusion you have to double tap on the clip to be able to make the adjustments and then key frame each element to animate.

It reminded me a lot of Adobe After Effects, if you have animated with as you should be okay to do it with LumaFusion.

By default LumaFusion doesn’t have its own transitions so I had to animate them by hand which was a simple process. The community has also made its own transitions but I opted to make my own.

When I looked up LumaFusion online I also noticed that Resolve another very well known editing package was also available for iPad but I opted to go for LumaFusion as it was available on my phone at the time.

here’s a link to the video

So in conclusion would I recommend editing the video on the smart phone? If you’re on the go, absolutely. However traditional video editing packages have their own advantages and features too. For now it’s a bit of a trade off from functionality to features and storage for assets. If you’re making short videos LumaFusion is the perfect fit. The ability to have multi-tracks on app is more useful than iMovie. The ability to animate and have more control over footage also great.

If your willing to use a computer there are plenty of free/open source video editing packages now available.