Tuesday, August 14, 2007

The New iMovie

Being the movie-making buff that I am, it's easy to see what Apple is doing with the new iMovie. Bickering seems to reign supreme right now with the Apple Faithful as to what Steve is trying to do here. Now at least Munster Nation will be clear on the matter.


We are living in YouTube world these days. Steve knows that being able to process video quickly and easily is the future, especially higher quality videos which are sorely lacking on YouTube. It shouldn't take hours to get your five minute video ready and pushed to YouTube, but currently that is the case.

And no one is using the web to post family videos, even though the web is a much better distribution system than the DVD. Why? It's a hassle. How many tapes do we have sitting around? Alot. Sort of like the shoe boxes of photos we used to have that never made it into photo albums. And we're not even making DVD much anymore. How many DVDs have you made in the last year?

iPhoto solved our problems for still images. Super easy to use, especially the new version. Easy to push your photos to the web, or to order prints or books. No shoe boxes. And you can step up to Aperture if you want to go hard core.

Today we have shoe boxes and shelves full of little camcorder tapes. The old iMovie was pretty easy to use if you were adept at using computers, but it's not a no-brainer by any stretch. And Steve wants things to be a no-brainer. Enter the new iMovie. Finally dealing with video is as easy as dealing with photos. Now it's clear that Apple has set up the same progression in video as they set up for photos. Step up to Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro from iMovie if you want to go Hollywood. But for making YouTube movies or stuff to share with family, nothing is going to beat the new iMovie.

So to the whiners out there: Keep using iMovie 6 or step up to Final Cut Express. iMovie is for the rest of us.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have to agree and disagree with your comments about imovie08. Personally most of my .dv editing is done to put our family video onto 1 hour DVD's. If I'm like a lot of people then my DVD tapes are usually a mix of many different events. With imovie06 I created DVD's with chapters and cataloged everything in a word document.

Now Apple has taken this ability away from me. I can't create chapter markers easily, It even does not seem obvious on how to send it to iDVD.

I'm not saying that it's bad to make it easy for folks who just want to send a quick clip to utube but why did they have to take away basic functionality for those of us who use DVD as our medium.

I am now making the switch to Final Cut Express which seems to be taking an investment in time to learn.
SM San Diego

Gene said...

Here was your question:

"why did they have to take away basic functionality for those of us who use DVD as our medium."

And here was your answer:

"I am now making the switch to Final Cut Express"

The consumer in you may not like it, but the investor in you should. Apple is going to sell more hardware *and* software under this model.