I’m starting content creation for the short format vertical video platforms like Tiktok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube shorts. Since I shoot videos on my iPhone and am firmly entrenched in the Apple ecosystem I decided to turn to iMovie first to see if it would be the perfect tool for editing my vertical videos.
Nope. I was shocked to find out that in 2023 iMovie for the iPhone is not designed for editing portrait videos. When I first got the original iPhone I always hated vertical video because everything you’d show the video on was designed for landscape format videos. It seems like iMovie for the iPhone is stuck in that era. With portrait video being so pervasive on social media, you’d think that iMovie for the iPhone would be the tool for vertical video creation, but that is not the case. I think this is a huge miss for Apple.
You can do basic editing of video, but you can’t export it without using a hack like in the video below.