iLife '08 Part 2: iMovie

In my continuing testing of iLife '08, I've taken quite a bit of time to put the controversial iMovie '08 through its paces. I find it to be a mixed bag. Some good, some bad, and some ugly. I'll get to that in a moment.

First, I think it's important to establish perspective. I work in video editing for a living, and have worked with both Avid and Final Cut Pro non-linear editing systems, as well as After Effects, Motion and Shake. I very familiar and comfortable with the timeline paradigm, which to a simplified degree, is what iMovie USED to utilize as well. I made a couple of personal projects using iMovie in the past, but I always found it difficult to use and extremely unstable. Yes, it used a timeline, but had only one track, which was very frustrating for someone used to mulitple video and audio tracks.

Another problem with previous versions of iMovie: DV format. Everything you added to iMovie had to be in DV format. That worked fine for video captured from DV cameras, but for video imports, it added transcoding time and lots of hard drive space to a project. DV is not the most efficient storage format for video.

Finally, iMovie (pre '08) was a DESTRUCTIVE editor. If you cut a clip, it did not preserve it for later re-use in that or any other project. To reuse a clip, you had to go back to the source tape and re-capture it.

All in all, iMovie (pre '08) was never a particularly useful program to me. All the above issues plus it's poor performance and stability made using it a frustrating experience at best. So how about iMovie '08?

The Good
The story was told by Steve Jobs himself: a member of the development team was having trouble quickly putting some vacation videos together, so he/she wrote some code to make the task easier. Someone caught wind of the project and the decisionmakers liked what they saw. So (apparently with the Steve's blessing) iMovie '08 was born.

iMovie '08 abandons the timeline paradigm for what Apple considers a more intuitive, user-friendly interface. And I have to admit, for the most part I like it. I had to watch the tutorial videos provided on Apple's web site to get started. This is primarily because I was initially unable to leave the well-ingrained timeline metaphor behind.

The iMovie '08 editing process starts with the events library. You add your video clips to the library and select from those clips to create your projects. Video clips are organized into events (much like iPhoto) and are captured from your camera or imported from your hard drive. I have been able to import video directly from my JVC Everio GZ-MG37U Hard Drive based camcorder, which records video into mpeg2 formatted video muxed into a .mod file. Previously, the only way I could get video off this camera and into something that could be read by any app on my Mac was through the use of MPEG Streamclip, which took a very long time to transcode the video to mp4 or H.264. Now, I plug the camera in, iMovie pops up the capture window, creates skimmable thumbnails of all the clips contained on the camera's hard drive (more on skimming later). I can play the clips and choose which to import or I can import all the clips. And I can store the imported clips on any external FIREWIRE hard drive. Nice.

Once captured or imported into the appropriate event in the library, iMovie creates thumbnails of all the video (I find that on my G5, this can take an interminably long time). "Skimming" (see video below) is the act of previewing your clips by running your cursor over the clip. In the pro world, we call it "scrubbing", but the principle is the same. This feature provides the "WOW" factor in iMovie '08. It is a truly excellent feature that is implemented so well that it even works smoothly on my G5. It makes it very easy to find the bits of video that you want to use in your editing project. Another nifty feature is that iMovie will now automatically make any video clip in your iPhoto library available in the iMovie library, providing it's in a supported format.

iMovie '08 allows you to work on multiple projects at once, another clear advantage over previous versions. But the greatest new feature has to be non-destructive editing. When you drag a portion of a clip from the event library into your project, the library clip is not altered in any way. You can therefore reuse footage over and over in any or all of your projects without having to recapture the footage. And that footage is no longer converted to storage hungry DV Video. My Everio clips, according to the Quicktime Player info window, are "Apple MPEG-2 SD Camcorder Video". Presumably any video you import will remain in its native format.

The Bad
I had a few issues with iMovie from the get-go. The first, which I've complained to Apple about, is that every time iMovie starts up, it thinks my big firewire hard drive, the one on which I store all my video content (i.e. backed up DVD's etc), is a camera and starts scanning and generating thumbnails automatically. There is no "Cancel" button and command-period doesn't work either (but then, it rarely works in any program), so I have to wait for it to finish OR remember to unmount the drive before I launch iMovie.

Problem number two: upon launching iMovie '08, it dutifully started creating thumbnails of my iPhoto video clips, but when it finished, only one video clip appeared. I checked all the other video clip formats and they were all mp4 files, which Apple says are compatible. Long story short, not all mp4s are created equal. I tried importing dozens of videos from different sources and in different formats using different codecs and nearly all were un-importable (even though Quicktime Player could play them fine). Strange.

Luckily, there is Perian, a free Quicktime component that permits a wide variety of videos to play in Quicktime, and after installing it, ALL my videos worked in iMovie, too.

I know a lot of users are complaining about the lack of effects and transitions, but I have never really liked flashy effects for the sake of effects, so I don't really miss anything here. Still, it is an omission for those who are accustomed to these effects.

The Ugly
iMovie '08's handling of audio is a CRIME. It is difficult, if not impossible to set your in point for your background audio or music clip. But far worse and utterly unforgivable: you cannot directly affect the LEVEL of the audio. You cannot even FADE audio in or out. My first project was coming together smoothly, until I wanted to create a closing credit scene with music. When the video came to an end and faded out, the music just stopped...abruptly. I looked everywhere for a control or an effect – ANY way of fading the music out, to no avail. The only level control is automatic "ducking", like in Garageband, in which you can select one audio track to prevail over another while they overlap. Very limited in its usefulness. Ultimately I had to find the natural end of the music and butt it up to the end of the video, which of course means it started abruptly, which is only slightly less unacceptable.

I haven't gone into detail on how to use iMovie. For that, I recommend you watch the tutorials Apple has posted on their website. I do like iMovie, but it is extremely flawed. Still, I consider it an improvement over iMovie HD, and can only hope that future versions address the issues I've raised here.

•VIDEO: See Skimming in Action

Rating: 5 out of 10 (iMovie HD: 3 out of 10)