Gee! No, GeeThree

First off, let me say that this is NOT a review of Gee Three software’s latest offerings, Volumes 9 and 10 of their so far great iMovie add-ins. I have done some reviews of their stuff in the past and if 9 and 10 are half as good as the previous releases, these will be must-haves for any iMovie enthusiast. If you want to see some of the things that the latest release does, go to the geethree.com site and check it out.

Like I said, this is not a review. This is more along the lines of a request. I listened to Tim and Chad’s interview with Bruce Gee on the MyMac.com podcast number 80 (and not just to re-listen to my always hilarious and oh so thought provoking Dashboard Minute</shameless plug>) and found a lot of what Bruce had to say very interesting. One of the things that caught my ear was the back and forth about where Bruce and company gets their ideas for the next set of plug-ins. Bruce said that the hardest part seems to be what to name the newest set. Maybe what Bruce needs to do is take a step back and think about what he has created before working so hard on the next set.

One of my complaints about iMovie is that it can be very difficult to take multiple shots of the same scene and edit them in. iMovie gives you that one video track and that’s what you have to work with. It is possible to input and edit with different shots but it isn’t easy or intuitive. So who’s going to take the next step? Why not GeeThree?

GeeThree has made plug-ins for iMovie related to titles, transitions, general editing, photo manipulation within iMovie, and even things like multiple screens with the same shot, and blue screens effects. All these things before Apple did or farther beyond what Apple ever intended for iMovie. After all, iMovie is a free product that other than highlighting the capabilities of the Macintosh, makes very little money for Apple. Apple of course would prefer that you buy Final Cut Express or Pro once you have gone beyond the capabilities of iMovie. Bruce Gee’s company keeps pushing the envelope and making iMovie do a lot of what Final Cut can do, but still keep the simplicity of the iMovie interface.

This is all good and well, but I think that they should go to the next level. How about a full-fledged digital movie editor from GeeThree? What I’m thinking of is something along the lines of Strata’s long abandoned movie editor VideoShop. VideoShop is what I cut my teeth with for digital video editing and it was a great, if somewhat buggy and occasionally crash prone OS/8-9 piece of software. Alas, it was not updated when OS X came out and Strata gave up on it just as it was getting interesting.

I think GeeThree could do it better. Give us multiple video and audio editing tracks with the power of GeeThree’s plug-ins. Volume 10 from GeeThree has a plug-in that allows you to pick start and stop edits for multiple movies from within iMovie. Why not give it a decent GUI and sell it. Give it the power of GeeThree’s superior text and image manipulation movie magic. iMovie is great, but shouldn’t be the end of inexpensive digital movie editors. While there are a few others (like MovieWorks by..um..MovieWorks Software), GeeThree has a knack of taking something hard and making it simple. I would love to see what they could do on their own with iMovie. Are you listening Bruce?