Kay, there’s been a lot of bickering online the past few days about the newest version of the entry-level video editor iMovie (yes, I know another Apple-related post – it’s a sickness, I tell ya). David Pogue spoke for a large and vocal number of he user community on a post on the New York Times web site (the comments are as interesting as the posting). To summarize, the primary complain of the users is that the basic workflow has changed significantly and functionaliy that existed in the previous version is no longer available.
Apple rewrote the app from the ground up to become a TRUE entry-level video-editor that anyone can start to use and immediately understand. Another goal was to reduce the effort involved and allow users the ability to create short videos extremely quickly.
After using it to import my old video clips and reconcile them to the new paradigm, I have to say: critics be damned. Apple has not only accomplished their goals, they have hit one out of the park.
The new iMovie approach, with the ability to quickly scan through hours of video footage, and then “pinch” the segments you want, is revolutionary. Video projects that have laid fallow for months were completed in less than 20 minutes, and quickly uploaded to youtube thanks to the new integrated youtube plug in. Examples:
[youtube]-Ek_oblwM98[/youtube]
[youtube]kYHVPtM6S4w[/youtube]
Again, completed and uploaded within the hour. Yes, it ain’t “professional” quality, but if I need to do professional editing, I go to Final Cut Express or Pro. I want to not have to “work” to upload or edit home or family videos, and iMovie had become a cumbersome tool that required a lot of time to tweak and complete projects. This solves that problem, and in a fantastic experience to boot.
Two critiques, to balance things out: The process of getting my old iMovie content into the new app was ponderous and slow – it copied files into the new library format and that took some time (and file juggling to make space). Like all previous iLife upgrades, I expected to be able to click on the old file and have it pen in the new app – not the case with iMovie, and Apple could have saved themselves some cuustomer service calls from irate or confused users if they had developed a “migration wizard” to help people move to the new version.
Second, the whole “event” idea – the notion of structuring the content according to a time-stamp that the users can tweak – is a great idea, but there are problems with execution. Because of the migration process tons of video clips from 2002, 3 and 4 are showing up under the “2007” event category. Sorry, if you are gonna force a date-based structure on us, make sure the dates match the timestamps in the video files. Hopefully that will be fixed. And iPhoto? Their implementation of the Event structure tries to auto-detect the library and create events for the user. Good luck with that, as I ended up with at least a dozen events that contained one photo.
Worse than than that, if I try and delete the event, it takes the images in that particular event out of any folder it has been assigned previously AND puts the photos in the trash! WHAT THE HECK? Again, this needs to be fixed, and should have been done differently (I’m glad I don’t work in an Apple support center right now).
Both these critiques are far more valid in my opinion than the users complaints of the iMovie “downgrade.” The old version of iMovie is still on your hard drive, and if users want to keep the existing model in place they can use the old version.
The more I use iMovie 08 the more I like it. Again, a huge win for users and another “ooh, cool” feature for Apple to promote.