My nam is Jan Bliddal and I am normally editing my home movies in Final Cut Pro something I started doing af few years ago.
Final Cut pro is an excellent editing tool, which I know very well even though I only masters a
fraction of its features and capabilities. All those features has however one major drawback. That is
the time you can use perfecting your edit. Larry Jordan or Philip Hodgetts recently said your are
finished with the edit when someone takes your work and carry it away. I do not have a deadline that
tight, and I am thus according to my wife using to much time perfecting my homevideos
Using that much time perfecting video is ok when the purpose is a chrismas video some month from the
present, but not if you want to update your homepage with a current video. I thus decided to buy
iLife 08 to se if Steve Jobs was telling the truth when he claimed the new version enabled people to
edit movies way faster than previously possible.
I choice the 90 min of HDV video I filmed during our Vacation in Bulgarian this september. The
purpose was to see how fast I could edit it down to a whatchable video for our homepage. Not to compare
it to older versions of iMovie. I can´t do that simply because I never really used them.
How does it live up to the claim about beeing faster? Quite good actually. I was able to finish
a 10 min video in less than 3 hours. The lack of editing options did help, but the editing speed was
especially improved by the way it is possible to scrub through the clips at more than normal speed, and
the magic of the normalization sound buttom. The end result was maybe 85-90% of the quality of what I
would be able to make in Final Cut but made in 1/5th the time. I can thus conclude that iMovie really can speed
up my editing when I need to finish something fast.
What is the strenghs of iMovie 08, and what is it weaknesses. Is strenghs is its simpel interface
and the way it makes it possible to scrubb forwards and backwards in the clips. Its ability to show
every clip in an iPhoto like libery makes it easy til look through clips to decide whether you want to
use that particular clip or not.
The inteface is divided into
5 parts uper left has the Library window. This give access to all your projects. You will find
a storyboard window to the right of that window. It is here you place the clips in the order you want
them to play. The window to the right of that shows the clip your are playing at the moment or the
collection of clips if yur are playing the clip in your storyboard window. Bottom left is
the event libery. iMovie works with events just like iPhoto 08. Those events is based on the name of
the project as well as dates and changes in that. Finally you have the window with all the clips in
the project you are working on.
The easy access to your clips and the speed you can scrub through the clips really speeds up your
editing. The simple intefaces and the limited amount of choices helps you with the decisions, but it also
limites your possibilities. The limitation of choice is at the same time its biggest weaknesses. You do
not have access to a lot of filters to changes the look of a clip. You cannot change the level of one
soundchannel without changing the other. It is impossible to have more than two tracks of audio. That is
a task for garageband where you can created a multitrack soundtrack mix it down to 2 tracks and use
that in iMovie
Can i recommend iMovie. That depend on what you want to use it for. Fast and effecient editing with
a title or two and sound normalizations of clips then yes. If you really wants to findetune sound and
pictures then no. For that purpose you need something with more choices.
Another reason for buying iLife 08, was to use the new webgalleries in .mac. That part turned out to be
a really disapointment. The quality is ok, but the speed of the download from the site is unberably slow. Something
I realized when my 10 minuts 100MB video needed 35 minuts before it started playing even though my internet connection is
a 15mbit download dsl connection.
People who wants to see the difference in downloadspeed from my .mac account compared two
the webpage can compare the speed by following this two links.
from the webgallery from the homepage It is the same 10 min 100MB video in h.264 but
with no download cap on my one homepage and a 60 to 80kb download cab on my webgallery
I like that the webgallery gives people the option to download the movie and forward the link
to a friend, but I do not ikke the facts that it takes ages before it is ready to play the clip. That
lack of speed really kills its usefull ness.
A bit of warning regarding the movie. Its is a vacation movie. I am from Denmark and we are speaking
danish in it use it if you want to test the downloadspeed from a webgallery to the download speed from a
cheap webhotel
The inteface is divided into
5 parts uper left has the Library window. This give access to all your projects. You will find
a storyboard window to the right of that window. It is here you place the clips in the order you want
them to play. The window to the right of that shows the clip your are playing at the moment or the
collection of clips if yur are playing the clip in your storyboard window. Bottom left is
the event libery. iMovie works with events just like iPhoto 08. Those events is based on the name of
the project as well as dates and changes in that. Finally you have the window with all the clips in
the project you are working on.