Fade in and Fade out with iMovie for iPhone

July 01, 2010

The other day I was editing together a short video on iMovie for iPhone. Everything was a going well (it’s a fun app to use) until I wanted to do a nice fade in from black at the beginning of the video and a fade to black at the end. While iMovie for iPhone includes transitions between video clips, it does not currently allow you to have transitions at the beginning or ending of your video (the audio doesn’t fade out during editing but it seems to be processed to do so during export from iMovie).

So I faked it. Here’s how:

Sit your iPhone 4, main lens down, on a dark surface— I used a Moleskine notebook—and shoot about 5 seconds of video. This creates a black video clip. Drop this clip in the front of the video and trim it to 0.5 second and drop it in again at the end of your video and trim it as you wish. Finally, make sure you have a cross-dissolve set up between the black clip and the first and last video clips. 

That’s it. You now have a nice fade in and fade out for your iPhone iMovie.

See it in action:

First Ever iPhone 4 Movie Featuring Driving a Volkswagen Passat with a Bruce Springsteen Song as the Soundtrack from Ryan Irelan on Vimeo.