LumaFusion is the obvious step up from iMovie. It's much more powerful than iMovie, but aims to also be very approachable for complete beginners.

Disclaimer: My day job is as an engineer working on LumaFusion.

LumaFusion is great. Impressive speed, even on an older iPad. I honestly didn’t think it was possible. You guys are doing great stuff. And thanks for letting me own the software, not just rent it.

Thanks for the kind words. I feel lucky to get to work on it. And I’m on the same page regarding subscriptions. I much prefer to own my tools too.

I looked on the web site but can't find the answer. Does LumaFusion support vertical videos in a sane fashion?

Yes. You can explicitly set your project's aspect ratio, including 9:16 (which is the iPhone vertical ratio) and edit it that way. You can also include vertical video in a non-vertical project with black bars on the sides ("fit"), by cropping ("fill"), or stretching ("stretch").

Wow! I love LumaFusion! It’s hands down one of the best tools on my iPad for professional videos on-the-go.

1) Rotate the video to landscape in Photos app.

2) Import that video in iMovie and do all the editing you need to do.

3) Export the final video.

4) Rotate the final video back to portrait in Photo app.

I assume that would break the orientation of text insertions?

Aren't they hard-coded into frames?

Probably not considered simple, but the free tier of DaVinci Resolve is excellent and can make custom dimensioned videos. I produce a lot of videos in a variety of proportions (including 4x5 and 9x16) and it works well. Downside is that the interface is best for landscape videos; I always wish I could rearrange the interface to accommodate a larger vertical preview.

Wow, this is the one feature I expected would be the raison d’être for an update of iMovie. Now it's still useless. That's really odd.

yes it’s quite bizarre that key functionalities are split between the built in Editor and iMovie. almost all videos have to be done using both. doing vertical videos + text is very awkward.

> It doesn’t look like it can make vertical videos in the iPhone app yet which is a little disappointing.

The longer we prevent vertical videos from happening as a society the better off we will all be for it. Our eyes aren't designed to watch vertical videos. Continue the good fight.

Hm. I am not sure if your comment is sarcastic. So the following may be a waste.

But I’ll follow it. Is your thesis that video should not be moving full screen on mobile devices in casual usage, i.e. Without the user rotating their device?

To expand on this, should mobile device camera apps warn users to not shoot portrait video due to being ”unergonomical”?

My thesis is that the most natural way of viewing videos is with a longer axis in the horizontal than in the vertical. Users should rotate their device to watch videos.

> To expand on this, should mobile device camera apps warn users to not shoot portrait video due to being ”unergonomical”?

Mobile phone camera apps shouldn't even understand the concept of shooting footage in a vertical direction.

The boat you are wishing for seems to have already sailed. Social apps are growing / have grown a generation that ejoys vertical video as a medium of its own. So whether vertical video is unnatural seems debatable either way at this point.

Honestly the fight is lost with instagram and tiktok

My god it's tragic that vertical video has become a legitimate format when it really just arose from people holding their phones wrong.

"Holding their phones wrong" — you mean, holding a rectangular affordance ergonomically in their hands?

The odd thing to me is that you can't just tell your vertically-oriented phone to produce landscape video. The imaging sensor is square.

It's not square. It's usually cut in 4:3 format.

The imaging sensor is a rectangle in roughly the same aspect ratio as what is captured by the stills mode.

You can see that in any teardown.

I do agree there's no "right orientation" though since it's subjective. However having a square sensor would be illogical

Yes you are holding it wrong because the resulting video is clearly wrong if you view the video on a TV (same aspect ratio, other orientation), a computer or if you watch movies, or if you, well, see out your eyes. If you want to capture just about any action, it's going to look better in landscape, and that is why EVERYTHING until phones were put in the hands of plebs is shot in landscape.

Now, you could argue that we've gone more mobile, and newer social media formats expect portrait, but, that doesn't change that it's risen because people take videos and never consider, "hmmm, if I turn it around, I get a better picture and it looks more like a TV! Duurrr." Just because it's more popular doesn't mean it's not stupid AF.

I know plenty of people that don't own a TV or a monitor, they only own a phone and they have a locked to portrait mode. I wouldn't be surprised if you checked the world and there were more of those people than TV owners at this point. Why should they have to make their videos for TV users?

Point-by-point: phones can (should be able to) unlock from portrait for video. As I said, video is generally better in landscape, so it's not really about TVs, TVs are landscape because viewing video is better in landscape. Why anyone has to even argue this OBVIOUS point just demonstrates the militant ridiculousness of people that get on the defensive because they often (not always) put no thought into their video compositions. Vertical video look stupid, get over it.

What if I record videos for viewing on phones? Do I deserve insults too?

Well you can do what ya like, but I, as a viewer do have the ability to turn my phone to landscape to view landscape videos. What are you shooting? Pile drivers in action?

“Talking head” video is better in vertical orientation for the same reason painters have been creating portraits in vertical orientation for centuries: humans are vertical. Much of TikTok and other networks’ vertical stories are indeed videos of people.

I used to feel the same as you when the Vertical Video Syndrome came out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dechvhb0Meo

Now, I think that there is probably more vertical video made each minute than there is wide.

I really enjoy watching vertical videos on TikTok every day and it is clearly much more ergonomic to hold the phone in the vertical aspect. When I create videos I use two cameras rolling at the same time, one in each aspect. It doubles my edit time, but lets me create content for vertical and horizontal platforms at the same time. Sometimes I have to shoot twice because certain content looks goofy if you try to frame it well for both.

Clips is tragically underrated and underused.

If you find yourself making vertical videos, you need to reexamine your life choices.