There are essentially two ways to edit mobile videos: directly on your mobile device, or on a computer or tablet after you upload the video content from your phone.

First, ask yourself if you want to edit on your mobile device or elsewhere. While most editing apps use the clips stored on your phone’s drive or your SD card, some recent ones edit in the cloud. This means you upload your video clips to an online server and your edit takes place there.

This should enable you to edit the same project on any machine (desktop or mobile), as long as it is connected to the internet. You would no longer need to worry about lack of memory on your device.

In reality, for this you need an absolutely reliable internet connection (so wifi, not 3G or 4G) and a speed of at least 1mb/sec. Even with a good internet connection, video file sizes should be kept low, or you can wait a long time for your clips to be uploaded to the cloud server. Also, storage in the cloud may cost a monthly or annual fee.

Remember, if you are not going to upload the video directly from your handset, use the highest resolution and quality settings your phone offers when you are shooting. You can later compress the video on your computer.

Editing programs and apps find it difficult to deal with changing formats. If you do have varied formats, you’ll need to compress the video first, but this should be avoided if at all possible as it reduces the quality of your video and audio.

Finally, check that your mobile device is recording to an SD card, not the internal memory. We suggest you invest in a 32GB or 64GB SD card.

Here are suggested tools:

WeVideo

WeVideo is a cloud-based video editing platform that has features such as simple timeline editing, royalty-free music, 1080p exporting, and direct uploading to networks…


Showbox

Make promo videos, YouTube videos & more with Showbox’s cloud based online video maker. FEATURES Studio quality – Footage enhancement, audio…


clipchamp

Clipchamp offers a free video editor, compressor, converter and webcam recorder.


movie

Free for Mac and iOSAdding titles, effects, and soundtracks, trimming clips and moving them around.


Shotcut

Shotcut is a free, open source, cross-platform video editor.