So I’ve had my iPad for a week or so now. One of the things I was looking forward to trying was iMovie, which while useable on the iPhone was a bit fiddly. Surely, I thought, the bigger screen and the retina resolution of the new iPad will make iMovie a pleasure to use?

Well, it turns out it’s still a bit fiddly. Not hard to use as such, but (for example) selecting just a bit of a clip is awkward. Trimming to the exact beginning or ending is not that easy. And you have to learn gestures and so on, which I guess will take time. That’s the key difference between tapping and keyboard shortcutting. I use a load of keyboard shortcuts in the desktop version of iMovie, and it’s frustrating not being able to do that.

Which brings me to Avid Studio. I saw it on the App Store and it struck me that the interface was (shock horror) actually better than Apple’s. I should add that the reason I thought it looked better was that it reminded me of the sorely missed and never forgotten original iMovie interface. The storyboard view. The linear timeline. The audio waveform that makes editing clips so much easier.

so I downloaded it. For just under £3 (around the same as iMovie) you get something very like original iMovie. This is high praise indeed, because I’m firmly of the belief that iMovie 2 was the best software ever made.

Your clips are in a bin at the top (just a square thumbnail for each). Tap once to bring it into the preview window, where you can easily set beginning and end points before touching and dragging down into the storyboard, where you can continue to trim if you want, using the waveform as a guide. You can also drag a whole clip down from the bin, and you can easily split a clip using the razor tool. (In iMovie, to split a clip you need to highlight then swipe down the playhead.)

I haven’t explored much further, but I’m happier editing with this than I am with iMovie, which I suspect will end up deleted. Avid Studio is less fiddly and I can work much faster and more effectively with it.

iPhoto, on the other hand, is more intelligible on the iPad.