New iPhone Photo App: PhotoMovie

Description from the AppStore: Make Amazing-looking movies using your photo library and music. Add titles, transitions, music, random animation and other effects.

Making great movies from pictures has never been that easy with this amazing unique and intuitive interface. Add, move, replace, reorder or delete sequences and transitions just from the tips of your fingers. Just drag and drop your images and transitions from/into the sequence bar and immediately see the result in the real-time preview area. When finalized, add the music of your choice from your ipod library and play your movies in high-resolution.

With the version 1.1, you can now share your movies with your friends and family. Choose the encoding quality (email, iPod or the best one) et send your movie by email or send it to your photo library. Warning: due to a limitation of the iphone sdk, the sound track will not be encoded in the movie.

Features:

• Amazing unique and intuitive interface
• Play in real-time using 3D OpenGL
• Navigate into the sequence bar to edit your movie
• Photo effects: sepia and monochrome
• Fit mode (Aspect Fit, Aspect Fill and custom)
• Orientations (Original, Landscape or Portrait)
• Animations (Ken Burn effects, Custom or Random)
• Back and text colors
• 9 types of transitions
• Choose duration of sequence and transitions
• Create multi-line titles
• Choose title fonts and sizes
• Title animation (Zoom, bottom to top, etc.)
• Can set default parameters
• Choose songs from your music library
• Loop mode

AppStore Link: PhotoMovie - Price £2.59/$4.99

Editors comments: This looks like a nice photo slideshow app that I hope to review in the near future.

Comments

[vincent.b]

Outch, I just bought the app because of the "Chose song from your music library" without reading the full description... and of course "due to a limitation of the iphone sdk, the sound track will not be encoded in the movie". Don't know if I'm really going to use it ever again... This limitation does not make real sense : in iMovie on OS X, you can chose soundtracks from your iTunes library. This possibility should be given to iPhone developers.

Quick review :

- selections of photos : quick & effective
- general slideshow setup : effective, with possibility of defining behavior for all slides or slide by slide
- interface : pretty decent, pretty reactive
- rendering : as slow as 5fps in best quality mode, as fast as 10fps in Email quality mode. video saved in photo album (cool). Best quality = 30fps 480x320, iPod quality = 30fps 320x240, email quality = 10fps 1160x120. Although you can email a best quality movie.
- opengl playback : fine
- playback supports portrait and landscape mode, but video rendering doesn't.
- transition or title duration can't be set under 0,5 sec (too long, way too long, this value should be as low as possible, then we would be able to achieve funky and powerful edits)
- no transparency for titles.
- fair amount of classic fonts for the titles.

Everything can be easily improved by the devs, but they can't fight the Apple limitation on rendering music. I'm sure they're as pissed about that than me :)

Conclusions :

- Good for on-device slideshows
- Bad for rendered and shared videos, because of the absence of soundtrack, not the devs fault)
- Promising as a tool to make video edits with just pictures (ideal for non 3GS owners) : it lacks things like short title and transition duration, transparency for titles

[Cedric]

Hello Vincent,

I am actually the developer of Photomovie and wanted to thank you for your review. Since I will continue to improve PhotoMovie, it is always nice to see serious review like yours. So, I wanted to bring some precisions about some of the choices I did and what I am planning next.

The reason for the transition duration to be at least 0.5 secondes is that it is a safe time for loading the next sequence. I can't load all the images at once before playing (memory problem), so the images are loaded one by one just before playing the transitions. I only own a 3G iPhone, on which 0.5 second was safe. I could go under that but then I took the risk to have unhappy users who would claim that the transition duration is longer than the one they have set and may say that this is a bug.

About the sound in the encoding movie, there is a work around that I am working on. It is possible to make a web server inside PhotoMovie that would allow the upload of soundtracks from your pc/mac through the Wifi. Then I would be able to add the sound track to the movie. Unfortunately, I didn't find yet enough documentation to do that but I am still working on it.

The edition interface is running under a realtime 3D engine that allows any kind of things. I loved the version 6 of iMovie because of the nice themes that was included. I want to add also this capability in PhotoMovie.

And like you mentioned, there are more things that can be improved, like the possibility to add title on image using transparency. Actually, this is very easy for me to do and I will add this in the next version of Photomovie.

If you have some requests, don't hesitate to tell me through my support email. I will do my best to continue to improve PhotoMovie. Thanks again for your review, it helps me choosing the next direction.

Cedric

[Luxaeternam]

Interesting review and an in-depth reply from the developer. This app is one I've been seriously thinking about buying, and in light of the reactivity of the developer will probably be purchased sooner rather than later.

[Cedric]

Thank you, I appreciate your comment. If you have any question or request, you can email me anytime (photomovie.support@gmail.com)