One of the biggest reasons that I bought an iPhone 3GS for was its ability to shoot video. While I don’t use it as often as I thought I would (because the audible ding it makes upon recording gives me away in…discrete situations) I do love having the feature on my phone. And there are times when the phone’s lack of native editing features drive me nuts. Luckily, Reel Director has come along and given the iPhone some of iMovie’s most valuable features all in the palm of your hand.

So let’s start off with what it can do. The app will let you create various video projects, and you can add clips shot in the camera app to the project’s timeline. No filming from the app itself. Once you’ve added your clips, you can tap on one clip and bring up a menu to let you adjust subtitle contents, position on the screen, and add transitions. There’s a long list of them that include wipes, dissolves, and fades. Each one with a number of variations. You can turn the opening and closing credits off you like as well. Once you’ve gotten your movie’s properties all set up, your iPhone will render the movie, and then you can either email it, or save it off to the camera roll. You can’t upload to YouTube from the app, but it’s trivial to save it out, and upload from the camera roll.

ReelDirector will not let you apply filters to video. No color adjusting and no messing with audio. This app isn’t going to negate your need for iMovie. I wouldn’t call ReelDirector an editor. It’s more like a producer. It’ll help you pretty up your iPhone movies by adding bells and whistles on top on the film, while never letting you change the content itself. Think of it as the movie equivalent of adding thought bubbles to your photos.

I love the tech under the hood but something about the UI bugs me. The color palette is pretty meh, and the interface as a whole needs a makeover. The standard iPhone buttons and switches look kind of ugly on black backgrounds. But overall, content is king, and ReelDirector is a workhouse. Hopefully in future versions, the UI will get some tweaks, and they’ll find some way to speed up encoding process without the need for newer hardware.

So is it worth $7.99?

If you shoot a lot of videos of your cat on your iPhone, and frequently find yourself wishing you could touch them up on the go, and email them to Posterous or to your secret Internet friend in New Zealand who understands you in a way your father never did, ReelDirector will be well worth the $7.99 you spend on it. Available now in the App Store. Here’s a roundup of videos that were created using ReelDirector.