How to edit videos shot on your Android phone on your iPad

I have a foot in both camps. I have an Android phone, but I also have an iPad. I occasionally shoot video on my HTC Evo 3d, but video editing options on Android are pretty sparse (hence one of my reasons for choosing an iPad for a tablet). The problem is getting your video off of your Android and onto your iPad can be a bit of a bear, although it’s not impossible. It can take quite a few steps to get the two ecosystems to work together, but this post shows you how to move your videos from you Android phone in order to edit them on your iPad.

1. First, you need to shoot some videos with your Android phone. So go out and shoot, but make sure your videos don’t suck.

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2. Once you have a few vides that you want to use, go to the gallery on your phone and share the videos with Dropbox. This of course assumes you have a Dropbox account and the app is installed on your phone.  If you don’t have Dropbox installed on your phone, create an account and install the app on your phone.

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3. Upload your videos that you want to use to a folder in Dropbox. It might be a good idea to create a specific folder to upload your videos to. In my case, I have a folder called “Mobile Video”.

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4. Once your videos are uploaded to Dropbox, you can download them to your iPad with an application called iUnarchive . In this post, I am using iUnarchive Lite, but for some reason the free app is no longer available on the U.S. App Store. The app is available on the Hungarian store, but you may just want to buy the paid version from the U.S. store. The reason we are using iUnarchive is because once you download the videos, the application allows you to move the video files to the iPad photos gallery (camera roll). We will be using iMovie for iPad to edit our videos, and the files must be in the Camera Roll in order for iMovie to find them. You will need to set up iUnarchive to connect to your Dropbox account. You will be able to add your Dropbox account under the iUnarchive “Add Cloud or Mail Service” button.

5. After connecting your Dropbox account to iUnarchive, you will need to download the files from Dropbox to “My Files” in iUnarchive, as shown below.

6. When saving to “My Files,” you have to create a folder. In my case, I called the folder of phone videos “Videos from Phone.”

7. Once you have the video files from Dropbox to your “My Files” folder in iUnarchive, you can move them to the iPad Camera Roll. To do this, select all of the files in your iUnarchive folder and choose “Save to Gallery” as shown in the image below.

8. “Save to Gallery” puts the files into the iPad Camera Roll, where they can then be found and used by IMovie for iPad. Have fun editing!

Got it? Yes, this is a clunky process which is mostly complicated by Apple’s file restrictions. However, once you do the process a few times, it becomes second nature. I’m contemplating making a “second a day video” sometime soon, and I think using my phone is the only way to do it, given that I have my phone with me at all times. I will probably use this same workflow to get the videos onto my iPad or my Windows laptop for editing and archiving.

Like many things, there’s likely another and perhaps easier way to get your Android videos on your iPad. If you have another or easier way, leave a comment below and help you web neighbor out,

 

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