With the latest iPhone Apple has written and released a simple video editing app which carries the same name as their bundled editing application with Macs, iMovie. I installed it today and gave it a try while at a Lego Club meeting this morning with my son. Generally I’m standing around for an hour anyway, so this made good use of my time.

After shooting my video I launched iMovie and it’s fairly straight forward. You pick a theme (if you want) and start dropping clips in. You can adjust the length of the clips, use dissolve transitions or each theme has a unique transition. You also have the option of using theme music or selecting your own music from your iTunes library on your phone. The editing interface is very simple to understand, there are four buttons around the canvas, return to the main project menu, play, insert media, record media.

Below the canvas on the timeline you have your video clip above your music track. Clicking on the video clip brings up a window where you can add titles, turn the clip’s audio on or off and edit the location details.

Clicking on a transition brings up options for having no transition, a cross fade, or a theme transition. You can also adjust the duration of the transition in this window.

Once your video is complete exporting is very simple, you can choose to export at three sizes, full 720p at the maximum. A completed video is placed in your camera roll and from there you can upload to YouTube, send as an MMS, email, or upload to MobileMe.

On the whole iMovie is pretty slick, it does just about what I’d expect it to do. Though I do have three complaints, or struggles I came across with this test. Only one of which is iMovie specific but since the camera tool is critical in the process I’m lumping them together.

1. Camera Has No White Balance Options: Sometimes the auto white balance doesn’t work well. In this piece we were at the Lego Store and the color balance was far too orange. Even 3 or 4 presets would help greatly to be able to control the image quality.

2. Theme Music Doesn’t Repeat: At least in the theme I used, the music track was one minute long and when it ends it stops, doesn’t repeat. My original edit was about 1:20 but it made no sense when the music ended with :20 left to go. So I pulled some clips out to get it to 1:00 so the music would fit. Even if it wasn’t pretty repeating the music would be helpful.

3. Can’t Upload 720p to YouTube: It appears that uploading to YouTube from the iPhone is 360p and not great quality at that. I can understand limiting uploads over 3G if necessary, but on WiFi why can’t I upload 720p from the phone?

Here’s the video, edited together in about 5 minutes after shooting. I’ve posted the 360p upload from my phone version and the 720p version I uploaded from my MacBook Pro after copying it from my phone.