Do Androids Make Movies? Creating A Video On My Android Tablet

I now have three Android devices to play with. Like many, I was suckered into the hype and technolust surrounding the new generation of mobile computing devices, and while I am more than satisfied with the capabilities of my MACBOOK laptop, it wasn't the iPad tablet which piqued my curiosity, but Google's Android platform. Coming from a background of Java development, it was perhaps the promise of programmability and customization which drew me to Android. (From what I have gathered about the iPad, it is a much more locked-down and Apple-controlled experience. The Apple Umbilical is great for Apple profitability perhaps, but a little too stinky for old school computer freaks like myself who still dream of computers as being programmable multipurpose machines).

And so, having got that introductory rant out of the way, I will advance to the main point of this article, which is to relate my experience with making movies on my Android Honeycomb tablet. The two apps which I have demoed are: 1.) Arcsoft's Movie Story verion 1.0.0.21 and 2.) Google’s Movie Studio for Android. My testing scenario was this: I have a lot of video clips taken on my recent holiday to Spain and the UK. Also, I have a large library of royalty free background music from Free Soundtrack Music. What I wanted to do was simply join a bunch of video clips together in the editing app and attach some appropriate background music to the finished product. The results:

1.) Movie Story:
What I like about Movie Story is the straigt-forward ease of use. I didn't have to go searching for tutorials to try to figure out how to work the app. The downside was that almost all of the editing features were of limited use in the free version. For example, I wanted to put some text-over titles, clicking on the Text menu item just brought up a link for me to go to the Google play store, indicating that this feature requires add-ons to be activated and ready for use. This quickly became unpractical and annoying, so I advanced to my evaluation of Movie Studio:

1.) Google's Movie Studio:

With Movie Studio, things were not quite as easy to figure out, but all of the required funtionality was there and ready to use without having download or buy add-ons and extentions. I could add a title to my video quickly and easily. I am not going to get into in-depth how-tos, but would rather refer you to someone who has already spelled out the particulars of how to operate the app: how-to-edit-video-with-movie-studio.