LumaFusion 2.0: a mobile journalism 101

Reporters have all sorts of new possibilities in this day and age thanks to all the apps available on their smartphones.

Video editing app LumaFusion is another must-have app which is essential for creating videos on-the-go. But it has undergone some changes yesterday (16 June 2019), adding some new features and tweaking some old ones.

LumaFusion 2.0 has made mobile editing that little bit easier to execute. Here is our guide to the most important changes and what that means for the modern day mobile journalist.

User interface

The biggest and most noticeable change is the user interface, which has been redesigned. Cast your mind back to the previous version, and you might recall that the variety of tools were scattered in different places around the app.

Now, all of your tools are stored in one taskbar along the bottom of the screen. Here, you can cut your clips, export your project and access your settings from one place.

The new taskbar in red

Timeline overview

Underneath the preview window, the new update now includes a ‘timeline overview’, enabling you to jump to any part of your project much easier than before.

Timeline overview circled in red

Playback in the app has also been fine-tuned so that you can move move frame-by-frame through your project. By pressing and holding the play button, you can find the precise moment in the project where you need to make your edit.

Tracks

Have you ever run out of available tracks for your project? Now you can add multiple layers without that fear as LumaFusion now supports up to 12 tracks - six for audio and another six for photo, video and other audio content.

Whilst LumaFusion admits that working with more than its previous three tracks of video may reduce the quality of playback of the preview, it wont affect the final exported product.

New track menu

A new-and-improved menu for each track is also available, which allows you to easily mute whole tracks, as well as hide, unlink or link, and lock and unlock different tracks.

Menu circled in red

Locked tracks cannot be changed directly, but alterations to other tracks can affect its length. It is worth knowing that you can stop this from happening this by heading into the help/settings menu, click preferences and select Unlink Track When Locked.

Unlink Track When Locked circled in red

Markers

Markers are useful features in many types of audio and video editing software which can bookmark important parts of your project, or add notes for a colleague for editing.

At long last, LumaFusion has added markers to its roster of features. These can be added by marker icons at any time during the project in the preview window. Once selected, these can be customised with one of seven colours and accompanying text.

Marker icon circled in red

Removing any marker is just as easy; just click on the marker you want to remove in the small timeline and click the add/remove marker icon. You can also jump to each marker quickly by clicking the jump left or jump right button on either side of the play button.

Help

Whether you are a LumaFusion newcomer or a veteran, the app can be a bit daunting. But if ever you are unsure, you can press and hold down the 'help and settings' button on the taskbar to bring up a simple explanation of all of the different icons.

You can use this to play around with all of the features on the app, to point you in the direction when stuck, or to find where your favourite tools are now located.

Other updates, iPad OS and iOS13

There are also a variety of smaller changes, such as the app now displaying the duration of your project and fonts being included in user-saved styles.

These are not the only updates coming to LumaFusion, with the launch of Apple’s iPadOS and iOS13 in the autumn of this year. These include support for custom fonts, the ability to have multiple windows of the same app open at once and the capability to add files from USB drives to add files.

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