Exciting news on Planet Doug: I decided to dip my toe back into the water of editing video on a smartphone with a mobile video editing app. I don’t have to do that, of course. I have a powerful video editing laptop thanks to the generosity of a Planet Doug subscriber, and I do all my editing and other work on my Asus TUF A16 power house. It chews up video projects like nobody’s business.
However, there are times when editing on a smartphone could be advantageous. For example, it would open up opportunities for camping out in a tent. Sleeping in a tent is normally a huge problem for a YouTuber because to really get your work done, you need the conveniences of a hotel room. You need power so you can plug in your laptop and charge your batteries. You need WiFi for uploading videos. But if money is getting tight, and you want to save some cash by sleeping in your tent, then editing on your phone can be a lifesaver.
I used to edit on a smartphone all the time. I started this YouTube channel with a Dell Inspiron student-oriented laptop. I bought that cheap $300 laptop in Kuala Lumpur before I launched “The Cycling Canadian” YouTube channel (now renamed Planet Doug). I bought it just to be able to type emails and maintain a WordPress blog and upload photos. And when I started shooting video with my old, broken Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera, I edited all my videos on that inexpensive Dell, and the only program it could run was Windows MovieMaker. To think back to those days makes me laugh now. What a difference to be running DaVinci Resolve on an Asus TUF A16 today. It’s like going from a Model-T Ford to the Space Shuttle.
But that Dell Inspiron gave up the ghost when I was in Myanmar, pre-pandemic, and in order to continue shooting and editing videos, I had no choice but to switch to a mobile editing app on a smartphone. In fact, my smartphone became my editing machine and my everything else machine. I purchased a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard, put my smartphone on a small tripod, attached a Bluetooth mouse as well, and I had a mobile work station based on a smartphone. I can’t remember all the editing programs I cycled through at that time. Most of them were awful, but I eventually discovered an editing program called KineMaster. And I signed up for one of their annual subscription payment plans to be able to use that program without them putting a big KINEMASTER logo watermark on it.
Using KineMaster was surprisingly easy and surprisingly good. Most people react with astonishment when they hear that anyone is editing their videos on a smartphone. Daniel from the American Hobo channel has always done that. He has never edited his videos on a laptop. He’s always used a smartphone while lounging in his hammock or lying down in this tent while camping out. And people think that is a great accomplishment and they think it must be really hard. People imagine that you need the most powerful laptops with the highest specs and the biggest screen to edit video. But those of us who have edited video on smartphones over an extended period of time have a secret: we know that it’s actually not that hard at all and it works really well.
Unfortunately, there are two big problems that I faced when I originally edited all my videos on a smartphone. The biggest problem was that UPLOADING a video to YouTube from a smartphone was nightmarish. The editing wasn’t the hard part. It was the uploading. There was something about the connection between a smartphone and YouTube that meant the uploading of a huge video would get interrupted, and every time it was interrupted, the uploading would be cancelled and start all over again from the beginning. When you upload to YouTube on your laptop, that doesn’t happen. You can even pause the uploading yourself and shut down your laptop overnight. And when you turn on your laptop in the morning, you can resume the uploading from right where it left off. You don’t lose anything. But when you use the YouTube mobile app on a smartphone, it’s a different story. Countless problems can mean that your upload gets interrupted, and rather than keeping and saving everything you uploaded, it starts from zero and has to upload the entire video file from scratch. And this interruption can happen multiple times. It can take days upon days to finish uploading just video from a smartphone, and you live in fear the entire time. At least I did.
The other major problem I faced was that for some reason, the audio and video would drift out of sync in KineMaster when I did the final export. I would edit the entire video on my phone in KineMaster, and everything would be fine. BUT when I exported that video for uploading, the audio would be slightly out of sync with the video. And there is nothing more annoying than watching a YouTube video where the speaker’s lips and mouth movement don’t match what is being said. And I fought with this problem forever. It would come and go. And I was never able to track down a solution and fix it once and for all.
And it was because of these two problems that when I had the chance to leave mobile editing behind and start using a laptop again, I leapt at the chance. At that time, I was in Thailand, waiting out the pandemic in the border town of Mae Sot. And a generous Planet Doug subscriber sent me a MacBook. And I became a MacBook user and stayed one for a long time. I never did fully adjust to the Apple ecosystem, but this MacBook was the nicest piece of technology I had ever owned in my lifetime. It wasn’t a high-end model MacBook with all the most powerful processors and all that. But it was leagues better and nicer than anything I’d ever used in my lifetime. And that MacBook became the main machine I used for video editing and all my other work.
But things don’t last forever, and after a few years, my beloved Mac just stopped working. Everything broke on it. The keys on the keyboard fell off. The screen cracked. And then the actual important parts on the inside, the guts of the machine, started failing. I managed to get it fixed once or twice. But right after being fixed, it would die again. And it was clear that paying to have it fixed fully would cost more than just buying a new laptop, so I had to let it go. And then, after a period of time, my current laptop, the Asus TUF A16 came into my life.
And now, today (this afternoon in fact) I decided to test out mobile editing again. And I had one specific reason for doing that. I was about to leave Melaka on my bicycle, and I was contemplating spending a lot of nights in my tent. Planet Doug is not exactly pulling in those big YouTube dollars, so money is not plentiful. And I was thinking that it would be nice to save some money by camping out as much as possible. But when I contemplated that first night in a tent, I was stuck at this idea of how I would edit the video of the day. I’ve developed a certain routine that has me recording video and audio on a pretty complex set-up, sometimes using as many as three cameras at the same time. And I’ve become completely dependent on a hotel room environment for editing. I need power and WiFi. So if I leave Melaka on my bicycle, shoot video all day, and then sleep in a tent on the shore, when and how exactly am I going to copy these video files to my laptop and start editing? In a tent, it would be impossible. So if I sleep in a tent for a night or two nights or three nights in a row, the video would be piling up like crazy. And eventually, I’d have to check back into a hotel for a week just to get caught up on the editing.
And while thinking about this, I wondered if I could edit video on my smartphone on the nights when I’m sleeping in my tent. I don’t even know if it’s reasonable for me to sleep in a tent these days. Even when I was younger, I found it extremely challenging. It’s not just being unable to edit on a laptop. It’s being hot and sweaty at the end of the day with no shower to get cleaned up in. It’s being hungry and thirsty with no possibility of just stepping outside and grabbing a bowl of noodles. It’s having an upset stomach and desperately needing a bathroom with nothing but the outside world around you. And there you are out in the bush trying to set up a tent and then lying on the ground trying to sleep in the heat and humidity. And then the regular nighttime rainstorm moves in. It’s not an easy life just on its own. Now try to edit video and run a YouTube channel. The problems seem overwhelming.
BUT if I managed to fight my way through all those physical discomfort in service of saving money and NOT paying for hotel rooms, then perhaps editing video on a smartphone could come in really handy. And with this thought in mind, I started doing some research. Right away, I ran into the problem that there are very few usable mobile editing apps out there for me. The vast majority of mobile editing apps can’t do the things I need them to do. They are designed for people making short clips for TikTok, and so they have few controls and they always have a portrait orientation, which I can’t stand.
I originally used and liked KineMaster in the past because it was modelled after a full-scale editing program and had similar controls and file management systems to a program like DaVinci Resolve. And back in the days when I used KineMaster, the only reasonable alternative was PowerDirector. Both KineMaster and PowerDirector had a landscape orientation option and had a full set of controls. You could have multiple video and audio tracks and things like that. And I think those were the only two options back then. But they both had dealbreakers. KineMaster had the audio syncing problem. And THEN, for some reason, they went crazy with the price. They suddenly jacked up the subscription price to $120 US a year, which is a lot. And PowerDirector also had deal breaking flaws, one huge one in particular, which they never fixed.
So when I got this idea to test mobile editing again, I started looking into all the available options in 2026. I looked into KineMaster again. And it’s a possibility. The program still works in roughly the same way as before. And it now costs $60 US a year. I guess they lost so many customers at their $120/year price that they backed down. But I don’t really trust KineMaster because of that problem with audio and video not syncing. I looked into PowerDirector as well, but I found several deal breaking flaws in how the program operated. I decided that there’s no way I could use it. I then checked into a variety of free or inexpensive programs, such as VN Video Editor. But all of these use only a portrait orientation, which I dislike using intensely. And there were many other problems with every one. I tried VN and CapCut and YouCut and as many others as I could find. None of them suited me.
But, luckily, there is a relatively new option called LumaFusion. I’ve had my eye on LumaFusion for a long, long time. It keeps coming up as the top recommendation for the absolute best mobile video editing app. AND it was available for a single lowish purchase price. You didn’t have to pay for a monthly or yearly subscription. The problem was that it was ONLY available for iOS on iPhones. There was no Android version. But then in 2023, they finally came out with a version for Android. From all the comments I saw online, the Android version wasn’t as good as the iOS version. It lacked some of the truly high-powered features, such as MultiCam Studio, and it was much buggier and less reliable. But at least there was an Android alternative now.
I sat down at my laptop yesterday and I worked through about twenty video tutorials for LumaFusion. I wanted to make sure it was suitable for me before I took the chance and bought it. They don’t have a free trial period available to test it out. So I watched as many tutorial videos as I could, looking for any possible gotchas, any big deal breaking problems. But as far as I could tell, LumaFusion had all the features I was looking for. And as long as it was able to work on my somewhat older Galaxy Note 10+ and it wasn’t too buggy, I thought I could risk giving it a try. So this afternoon, when I got back to my hotel, I took a deep breath and made the purchase. It is listed at $29.99 US, which is a pretty good deal considering it seems to be the most professional mobile video editing app on the market, and that is a one-time purchase price, NOT a monthly or annual subscription. My Google Account is in Canadian dollars, of course, and it came to about $45 Canadian, and I was able to funnel the Google Play Store payment through my PayPal account, which was awesome. For once, an online payment system worked for me, and I didn’t need my Canadian bank account or credit card.
I went out today and shot a video in Melaka, so I decided to use this new video project as a test for using LumaFusion. And so far, I have nothing but good news to report. Everything about it so far seems either excellent, good, or at least reasonable. The editing window is available in both portrait or landscape. And you don’t have to commit to one. Simply rotating your phone switches the editing window from landscape to portrait and back again. Here are the two views of the editing screen, how it looks in landscape and then in portrait:
There is WAY too much to talk about here to break down everything that is in these screenshots and what I like about it. But just to give a few examples, I have easy and instant access to the full folder structure and folder tree on my smartphone. It’s really easy to do. And when you see the thumbnails in the Media space, you can see the aspect ratio. And each thumbnail is clearly labelled with the full filename, and it shows the duration of the video clip plus the resolution. That’s almost unheard of for a mobile editing app. I was amazed to see it was that professional. Of course, you can click on each thumbnail to open up a much more detailed spec sheet. But I love that you don’t have to do that. You can see all the important information at a glance. And it has dynamic labels. When you insert one of the video clips into your timeline, it puts a yellow checkmark on the thumbnail. So you know exactly which clip has been used and which hasn’t. And it shows a yellow line across the thumbnail to indicate how much and which portions of the full clip were inserted into your project. It’s just incredibly well-organized and informative.
I also LOVE the audio waveform. The audio waveform is by far the most important feature for fast and efficient video editing. Many mobile editing apps don’t show you any audio waveforms at all. And those that do, often have them very small with very little shape. The waveform on display here is very clear. It shows clear and exact peaks and troughs, and that makes it a breeze to see exactly where I start and stop speaking and make precise cuts. And that’s essential for video editing.
I could go on and on about things that I like. LumaFusion has all kinds of navigation buttons and controls on display. For example, if you look under the preview window, you can see a set of arrows. There’s the play/pause button of course. But on either side, there are two other arrows, one pointing to the left and one pointing to the right. Click on those once, and the playhead jumps to the beginning or end of the current video clip. Click on them twice, and the playhead jumps to the very beginning or end of the entire timeline. That’s a key feature for efficient editing. KineMaster had a similar tool, which is one of the reasons I liked it. But most programs have nothing like that.
And everything just flows and hums along on my Galaxy Note 10+. There is no lagging or freezing at all. And I don’t even have to convert my 4K video files to a lower resolution. I had to do that for other programs, which can add hours to your editing workflow as you wait for the program to create duplicate copies of everything at a lower resolution that it can handle. LumaFusion just works with the original 4K video files without any problem at all.
So far, there is no buyer’s remorse. Things are looking good. I could still come across a multitude of “gotchas” and deal breakers, but I haven’t found any yet. The one big potential problem is the issue of audio and video syncing. I won’t learn about that until I finish this video editing project and export the final video. Then I can play the final export video and see if the audio is still in sync with the video. If it is (fingers crossed!!!!), then I may have found a winner. And that is so rare on Planet Doug. I always seem to run into one big problem after another with everything I try to do. But so far, this experiment and my $45 purchase is going smoothly. Let’s hope it ends just as smoothly.