How to edit videos on iPhone, starting with the free tools

What Photos already does, free

Most people install an editor before checking what is already on the phone, and for a single clip the built-in tools are usually enough.

Trimming is the yellow handle bar under the clip. Drag either end, then choose whether to save over the original or save as a new clip. Cropping, rotating, flipping and straightening all work on video, including perspective correction, which quietly fixes a lot of handheld footage of buildings and rooms.

The part people miss is that the full adjustment set applies to video. Exposure, brilliance, highlights, shadows, contrast, black point, saturation, vibrance, warmth, tint, sharpness, definition, noise reduction and vignette are all there, and so are the filters. A clip filmed under warm indoor light can be corrected in about fifteen seconds without leaving Photos.

All of it is non-destructive. Revert puts the original back at any point, including months later, which makes experimenting free. What Photos will not do: join two clips, add music, add text, change speed, or work on more than one track.

When the free Apple route runs out

iMovie is free, made by Apple, and covers the next tier: joining clips, adding a soundtrack from your library or its own set, titles, and a handful of transitions. Magic Movie builds a rough cut from photos and clips you select, and Storyboards give you a shot list to film against, which is genuinely useful if you do not know what to film.

Its limits arrive quickly. There is one main video track with overlays rather than a proper multitrack timeline, the titles look like the decade they were designed in, and there is nothing resembling the caption styling that short form video now expects. Audio control is thin, so ducking music under a voice is fiddly.

The honest summary: iMovie is the right tool for a family video that somebody will watch once, on a television, at a reasonable length. It is the wrong tool for anything going to a vertical feed, and that is what most video on a phone now is.

The order to edit in

Editing out of order is why an edit takes two hours instead of twenty minutes. Each stage changes what the next one should be.

Structure first. Decide what stays and in what order, with nothing added. Watch it through silent. If it does not hold your attention with no music and no text, no amount of either will save it, and you have learned that before spending an hour.

Sound second. Music or voice sets the pace, and the pace decides where the cuts go. Choosing music after you have cut means recutting to fit it.

Look third. Exposure, white balance and any colour treatment, applied consistently across every clip. Two clips from the same room that disagree on colour temperature read as a mistake more loudly than a wobbly cut does.

Text last. Captions, titles and any on-screen labels go on once the timing is locked, because moving a clip after the text is placed drags every caption out of sync.

The one exception is captions generated automatically from speech: run those at the start of the text stage, then fix the words the machine got wrong. It gets proper nouns and names wrong almost every time.

Four routes compared

Our full comparison of the third-party options is on the best video editing app page.

Text, captions and the safe zones

Most short form video is watched with the sound off at least part of the time, so captions are not an accessibility afterthought; they are how the video is consumed.

Generate, then correct. CapCut and Edits both transcribe speech automatically. Both misread names, places and anything technical. Read the whole transcript before export, because a wrong word on screen is more distracting than no caption at all.

Keep text out of the edges. Every vertical feed puts its own interface over your video: a caption and username along the bottom, buttons down the right side, and a progress bar at the top. Text placed there will be covered. Keep anything that must be read in the middle band of the frame, roughly the central two thirds vertically and clear of the right-hand column. Our Instagram sizes guide has the frame dimensions.

One idea per caption card. Short lines, two at a time at most, held long enough to read at a comfortable pace. If you have to pause the video to read the text, there is too much of it.

Contrast beats styling. White text with a subtle shadow or a dark plate behind it is readable over anything. Thin type, low contrast colours and heavy outlines all fail on a small screen in daylight.

Export settings that do not wreck it

The last step is where avoidable damage happens.

Match the frame rate you filmed at. Exporting 24 frames per second footage at 30, or the reverse, introduces judder on any camera movement. Leave the project frame rate alone.

1080p is usually the right ceiling. Uploading 4K to a vertical feed does not survive the platform's re-encode, and it fills your phone in the meantime. Export 4K when the video is going to a television or an archive.

Export once. Every export re-compresses, so a file that has been exported, reimported, captioned and exported again has been through the mill twice. Finish the edit, then export.

Check it on the phone, not the desktop. Play the finished file full screen on the device people will watch it on, with the sound off and then on. Most problems, particularly text placement and audio levels, only become obvious there.