Table of contents for Issue 21 in iPad User Magazine

It’s a common misconception that the apps you see in multitasking view are all currently running, and therefore slowing your iPad and draining its battery. In fact, what you see are simply your recently-used apps, and they have no impact on your iPad’s performance. In iOS, when you switch from one app and open another, there’s no need to quit the first – if it needs to carry on working in the background (playing music, for example) then it just gets on with it; otherwise, it’s seamlessly put on hold until you want to return to it.…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it IT WILL TAKE 25 minutes YOU’LL NEED iPad, iMovie When you’re making a movie masterpiece, the video clips are only part of the whole. Adding music, sound effects and other images can really help to convey a sense of mood or location in video. This could mean adding some local music and landscape photos to a holiday video, or adding comedy sounds effects to a home video of the kids playing in the garden. You can even add your own sound effects for extra realism, if you were working on a narrative film, for example. Good audio is almost subliminal, so marrying up just the right music with a particular scene, or adding in a subtle sound effect (even something like the sound of…

Bebop Drone with Skycontroller £780 Parrot, parrot.com This flying drone boasts an HD (1080p) video camera that shoots 14 megapixel stills. It can be bought just as a drone (£430), but the Skycontroller bundle gives you a twin-stick remote control unit capable of generating its own Wi-Fi hotspot, enabling you to fly up to a claimed 2km. The Skycontroller is a big unit and you’ll need the shoulder strap, as it’s heavy too. You can secure an iPad to the middle, giving you a live view from the Bebop’s camera. It’s quite a thrill when you get the drone out of sight and you’re flying like a real drone pilot, by just looking at a screen. Thankfully, there’s a button on the Skycontroller that returns the Bebop. If you can…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it IT WILL TAKE 25 minutes YOU’LL NEED iPad, iMovie Using iMovie makes it easy to not only shoot video on your iOS devices, but also turn that footage into a finely crafted film at the end. It’s astonishing to think that something as complex as video editing can be made so simple on an iPhone or iPad, but the strength of the iPad has always been that it lets developers create new ways to design apps. Like any feature-filled app, though, there’s still a lot to learn, so we’ll take you through the process of creating a new iMovie project, putting together a rough cut, working with transitions and themes, adding photos and music, fine-tuning your edit and exporting it to share with the…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it IT WILL TAKE 25 minutes YOU’LL NEED iPad, iMovie Any experienced video editor will tell you that getting your clips in the right order is just the start. Polishing and perfecting your movie is where the time really gets spent, but it’s also where you’ll turn a video from a quick and easy home movie into a memento that will last for years, or even into a narrative masterpiece. We’ll show you how to perfect each cut so that your scenes flow together perfectly, tweak the sound levels in your clips so you can hear everything clearly, add some multi-picture video and more – you’ll have a great range of tools at your disposal. By the way, once you start polishing up your editing…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it IT WILL TAKE 25 minutes YOU’LL NEED iPad, iMovie The idea of iMovie’s dedicated Trailers feature is that it presents you with a carefully structured template, and you just drop in the right kind of video, based on what it asks for. As long as you’ve got a good range of footage to choose from, you can create really smooth and exciting trailers in just a matter of minutes. Sadly, you can’t get the booming tones of the typical Hollywood voiceover man, but maybe this that’s not such a bad thing. Trailers don’t have to just be sneak peeks at larger films, either – in the case of a holiday video or school sports day, it can often be wittier and more succinct to…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it IT WILL TAKE 25 minutes YOU’LL NEED iPad, iMovie Once you’ve started putting together your video in iMovie, you might want to add a few graphical bells and whistles. Titles let you add some context to your footage, so you can name the people in your movie, or just give some extra information in documentary style. Meanwhile, transitions are added automatically between each of your clips. By default, the transition just crossfades from one video to the next, but there are other options to choose from, or you can remove them if you just want a normal cut between scenes. Adjusting titles and transitions is done using iMovie’s Themes, which give you a consistent look. It’s all really easy to use, and they’ll give…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it IT WILL TAKE 25 minutes YOU’LL NEED iPad, iMovie After you’ve finally finished editing, and polished your movie into a blockbuster hit (or just a fun memory for your friends or family), it’s no good if it just stays on your iPad – you’ve got to get it out to people online, or at least just onto a big screen. iMovie has a range of export options, letting you save out a final movie at a range of sizes up to 1080p, as well as enabling you to upload movies directly to certain online video services. This selection is contains the most popular options (including Facebook and YouTube), but if you want to upload to a video service not natively supported, you can always…