I wasn’t exactly sure of what Avid Studio could do when I bought it, but I knew I wanted it to do more than iMovie on the iPad. iMovie is good fun for editing family or vacation videos together, but it’s really not the best choice for trying to do anything more than that. I find many of the pre-rendered effects, like on-screen text, are set in stone and end up suffocating the fun I’d like to have with the app. Some fonts can’t be changed, text can’t be moved around the screen easily, and I find it difficult to cut clips with any measure of precision. iMovie definitely ended up feeling numbers among my most recent regrettable purchases, and I think Apple did a much better job with GarageBand (which feels like much more flexible, powerful, and fun software to use).
The $5 I spent on Avid Studio for the iPad, on the other hand, has already paid off. I’m still a relative newcomer to video production so Avid’s interface took me about an hour to get used to, but once I started to get comfortable, I got excited, and made the TF2 frag video I’ve always wanted to try and make.
Storyboarding
Having a storyboard in a video editing application could well be standard at the higher end, but it’s a completely new concept to me. The storyboard area, which is just below the halfway point on the screen, functions as an ordered snapshot of the photos, text, and video clips in your current project.
Photos come from the photo library, tunes come straight from your synced music library, and video clips can be synced to your iPad through iTunes (via the Movies or Photos tab – not the apps tab) or through the iPad Camera Connection kit. There’s also a third iCloud sync option with the Avid PC Suite, but I don’t own that software, so all of the clips I used were transferred to my iPad through iTunes.
Once you’ve started a project, creating your own supreme video is a matter of dragging and dropping elements right onto the storyboard. Video clips can be cut in a preview window before being thrown in, but you can always choose to cut them later. One thing I really like about Avid Studio is the way that it handles text: I’m a big fan of displaying static and animated text in videos, and I was pleasantly surprised by Avid Studio’s flexibility in this area. Text can be resized, fonts changed, words re-positioned on screen, and text templates can be dragged and dropped right onto the clip you want captioned. The only confusing part here is that dropping text onto a video clip will caption that entire video clip, so you’ll have to cut larger clips into smaller sections if you want to feature several different captions. Thankfully, cutting clips is as easy as dragging your finger across the timeline, tapping the “razor” button, and then tapping on “Video”.
You can also lay up to three simultaneous audio tracks over your project, although you have to be very precise about the levels for each bit of sound that you add. Each audio track that you add plays at 100% volume all the time, unless you go into the settings and change the levels up manually. This means that, by default, adding three tracks will net you a cacophany of sound that begs for some editing and leveling. It’s not impossible to work with, but it would more helpful if Avid Studio was more intelligent or aware of the audio that was playing at any time. Adding automatic leveling for newly added audio tracks, for example, would be pretty useful.
Transitions
Avid Studio comes with quite a few sound effects, text effects, and can play with all of the video and audio synced to your iPad. Put simply, the offering of two video transitions looks paltry in comparison. I’m not really a fan of outlandish transitions and I don’t need 20 different ways to switch between clips, but including just two at the outset does seem like transitions were treated as an afterthought.
Instability and Inconsistency
The lack of transitions are easy to get over, but Avid Studio’s instability is what can really test your patience. I’ve had the app crash on me four or five times in the same morning session, despite having taken pains to clear the RAM on my stock iPad 2.
However, what’s even worse is the way that certain sections on the storyboard simply will not render unless you repeat the order to do so. During the production of my quick TF2 frag video, I had to return to several clips and double tap on the video segment just to get the text to render properly. Otherwise, I’d find myself with text on a black background, full audio, but no video during those incorrectly rendered segments.
The final major bug in Avid Studio has to do with exporting: sometimes it just won’t happen. You can be well on your way to exporting your finished video to the Camera Roll, when suddenly Avid Studio will provide a pop-up that basically tells you “something isn’t right”, and cancels export. It seems that nothing short of leaving the app, killing Avid Studio from the multitasking bar, and re-launching will fix the export process.
Conclusion
There are some real technical issues with Avid Studio and the app definitely feels like it stretches the capabilities of the iPad 2 (especially when rendering text live over 720p video), but it’s also really the only pro-sumer video editor out on the App Store right now. I’ll take the currently crashy Avid Studio over iMovie any day of the week, and if you’ve been wanting to create something a little more complex than a home movie with your tablet, Avid Studio is definitely the app to buy.
Avid Studio was purchased by the author for review on iSource. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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