Top 10: Creative tasks with an iPad

7: Easy Video editing

There are few tasks that are more demanding for a computer than video editing, so we’re not going to recommend you load your AVCHD footage onto the humble iPad. However, the iPad 2 is powerful enough to cope with the 720p videos captured by its built-in camera.

Being able to edit your video on the same device you shot it on puts an interesting twist on the creative process. By dropping clips together in the edit as you go, it can help you realise what shots are needed to set your scene, tell your story or make your point.

Using the iPad 2 as a video camera has its strengths and weaknesses. It’s much easier to hold steady than a phone camera, and having such an enormous preview is literally a revelation. The downside is that wandering around with an iPad held at arm’s length is hardly subtle if you’re trying to shoot naturalistic scenes without passers-by gawping at you, and is a big invitation to opportunistic thieves.

iMovie is laughably easy to use

It might be worth running the gauntlet, though, as it’s hard to imagine a more user-friendly editor than iMovie (£2.99). Videos in the Camera Roll appear as strips of thumbnails, and are trimmed and dropped onto the timeline with a couple of prods. The simple editing tools make light work of truncating and reordering clips or adding transitions and text overlays. It’s also possible to record a narration or even video directly into the timeline. With uploads to YouTube and Facebook built in, iMovie is perfect for posting video bulletins while on holiday or for birthdays and Christmas.

If you just want to liven up individual clips, check out 8mm HD (£1.99). There’s a choice of vintage film effects including scratchy black and white, high-contrast film noir and the faded pastels of the 70s. All of which can be applied either to camera input or existing videos. Film jitter, vignetting and projector noise complete the experience. It’s all a little daft, but applying nostalgic imperfections is a great way to hide the less agreeable imperfections of the iPad 2’s camera.

8mm HD transforms the iPad 2’s cruddy camera into a quaintly flickering piece of cinematic nostalgia

Videolicious (free) takes the combined camera-editor concept to its logical conclusion, with a set of 25 templates covering topics such as Kids and Family, Restaurant Review and Sports Game. Pick a template and the app gives specific instructions as to what videos it wants – either from the Camera Roll or to shoot as you go. It then turns to the front-facing and asks for your thoughts on the subject. There’s no control over which clips are used when, but the automatically generated results are surprisingly convincing.

Stop-motion animation on an iPad is a stroke of genius – and iMotion HD delivers the goods

iMotion HD is a stop-motion animation program. It’s free but costs £1.49 to unlock its export facilities. More than ever, having the camera and editor in the same device makes perfect sense. Frames are captured one by one, and triggered manually, according to a timer, or even by using the iMotion Remote app running on another iOS device on the same network. It’s possible to adjust the playback speed and to delete individual frames after capture – useful for the occasional hand that creeps into shot. However, once you play back a scene, you can’t add further frames to it. That proved particularly frustrating when the app crashed on us mid-way through a scene. Still, it’s free to try out, and is a great form of family entertainment.