Okay, folks, like most of you I didn’t see iLife ’08 coming. Didn’t expect it until after the release of Leopard in October. But earlier today when I happened upon announcements of iLife ’08, I thought I’d head over to my local Apple store and purchasethis latest version of Apple’s stellar programs.
Of course I haven’t had time to look into all the programs, but I really wanted to first see what is new in iMovie ’08. Well, in a nutshell, what is new about iMovie ’08 is that it’s an almost completely new program. It’s now not only a movie making program, but it’s also a program for organizing and managing your digital movie files and projects.
So in getting to know this latest version of iMovie, I’m going to write about and possible put together a few tutorials about this latest program.
Before You Upgrade
Okay, before I move on, a few words of advice. Before you upgrade iLife ’08, close down all your applications before you get ready to install. The installation process does not require this, but after I installed the programs, I opened iMovie ’08 and it crashed several times a few seconds after opening it. So to solve the problem, I repaired permissions (Applications> Utilities>Disk Utility) and restarted the computer, and so far things are running smoothly. So again, before installation, close down all applications, repair permissions (which you should do on a regular basis anyway) and restart your computer. You won’t be told to go through this process, but I highly recommend it.
Okay, I’m going to use this blog space to share what I’m learning about iMovie ’08. These are my initial responses just hours after the iLife ’08 arrived in my local Apple stores. Not even the Mac geniuses I spoke with in the Apple store had played with the iLife programs or even installed them on the computers in the store before I made my purchase. I informed a couple of them I’d be glad to come back and give them some lessons on what I learned.
There’s so much to iMovie ’08 that I won’t even try to cover it one post. I’ll share as I learn.
When you first open iMovie ’08, you’ll be asked if you would like it to import any movies you have installed in iPhoto. My daughter shot a collection of clips back in July using the video feature on our family point-and-shoot camera, which were later put into iPhoto ’06. iMovie ’08 imported those clips into its Event Videos folder, and so I started the program with those clips.
As you can see with the quick screen shot I took below, the traditional timeline of iMovie is gone. The upper middle pane is where your now organize movie clips, photos, music, transitions, and titles that go into making up your movie. At first it appears that all your clips are organized in 3 columns across and vertically in as many numbers of rows as you have clips. But you can of course hide the project panels to get a wider number of your clips in view. A large screen monitor, of course, will also help to view more clips. You can decrease and increase the number of frames you see for each clip, but I’m finding the smaller number of frames too overwhelming to look at. The full 30 frames per clip is fine enough for me.
Import Features
This latest version of iMovie can handle nearly all types of video file formats, including MPEG, AVCHD, standard DV and HDV and Quicktime movies. With non-tape formats, you can even pre-select which clips you want imported into iMovie.
When you import a project into iMovie ’08, you can turn it into an Event that becomes a part of your iMovie library. So in other words, you can switch between projects and source clips without having to open up projects separately. It also means you can add or copy source clips from one event to another without having to locate the original source clips in the Finder. Essentially, you can have access to all the movie clips and movie projects you have stored on your internal and external drive right from iMovie ’08.
Scrubbing Super Fast
When you first interact with imported clips, what you will immediately notice when you put your cursor over a clip is that you can scrub through the clip at a super fast speed. Almost too fast in some cases. Yellow markers appear so that you can set where you want clips to begin and end. While this can be very frustrating for long time users of iMovie, I think once you get used to it, it’s going to mean putting together movies a lot faster. Once you set in and out points for a clip, you can simply click the letter E and it will put that cropped clip into the timeline/project panel. You can of course drag and drop selected clips or use the menu button to insert clips, but the shortcut key is the way to go.
You can scrub clips super fast in both the project’s panel and the source video panels. These two panels as Steve Jobs shows in his demo of the programcan also be switched around for different purposes. I haven’t figured out yet the advantages of switching the panels, but I’m sure the developer had something in mind that might be useful.
Transitions, Titles, Music, and Photos
As with iMovie ’06, you can add other media to your project. Each of these media has of course their own media browser whereby you can select and drop the media selections where needed.
The number of transitions and title selections are fewer than what you get in iMovie ’06. Third-party transitions and titles are not yet supported, but hopefully that will be worked out in the next few months.
In the area of transitions, it seems like Apple is trying to incorporate some of the features you get in Final Cut Express and Pro. You can, for example, now have transitions automatically applied when a clip(s) is added to the timeline/project pane. This could save lots of time if you’re just simply adding cross dissolves between your clips as you build your project. However, I can’t see a way to prevent this action from occurring automatically without opening what is called the Project Properties in order to deselect this feature. It would be great to be able to hold down the Option key to prevent the action.
Music
What I’m finding most annoying about this latest version of iMovie is the sound track/audio features. It seems you actually lose some control over how you organize and manipulate sound tracks. You have to open a couple of panels in order to make adjustments to sound/music tracks, and it seems like you lose control over how you fade-in and out of music. Worst of all, it doesn’t appear as if you can extract audio from clips the way you can do in previous versions of iMovie. I’ll keep looking for this feature, but I couldn’t even find documentation about it in the Help guide about iMovie ’08. This is a serious flaw which will definitely have to be fixed in the next update.
Exporting Features
Of course with this version of iMovie, you have additional ways to share your movie projects, most notably you now can export smaller projects to your iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, and to your YouTube account.
Other Issues
1. The one good thing about installing iMovie ’08 on your Mac is that you still have access to iMovie ’06! You will need the previous version because you cannot open completed ’06 projects into this latest version. You can import the media from ’06 projects into the ’08 version, but everything will not be in tack. The two versions are just too unlike one another to make that type of transition possible. So DON’T delete your older version of iMovie.
2. If you never got around to really understanding how to use iMovie ’06 or earlier versions, this new version is simply not for you. It does have a learning curve that will mean at least reading the Help documentation that comes installed with program.
3. Steve Jobs said in his presentation about iMovie ’08 that using this program will mean getting movies done faster. I can definitely concur with only having played with the program for a few hours. But I don’t think this version of iMovie is any way, shape, or form a replacement for Final Cut Express in terms of workflow and advance features.
4. As with each new version of Apple programs, I contend that you need to run them on the fastest Mac computer you can get. I can well imagine that iMovie ’08 might be very sluggish on Macs with less one gig of RAM. Apple recommends 1 GB of RAM (512MB is required) to run iMovie ’08, so what that really means is that you should have twice that. I wouldn’t even try to run this program on less than a gig of RAM. It would be a waste of time.
5. Speaking of speed, I can say that so far this version of iMovie is seriously faster and smoother (I’m running it on a Mac Pro with 2 gigs of RAM.) However, I have not tried it with a full fledge hour-plus long movie yet. The program could slow down at that point. We’ll see.
6. Lastly—because I could go on and on—iMovie ’08 includes a keyword feature in which you apply keywords to individual clips or entire projects as you have been able to do in iPhoto. I think the goal here is to use iMovie ’08 as a way of archiving movie projects and clips so that you can get at them for different purposes months and years later. And now because this version of iMovie enables to not only create movies but also to manage your files and projects for the long term, it’s important to have one or more dedicated external drives to house your projects and individual clips which can easily grow in number over time.
Well, that’s it for this entry. I’ll share more as I get more into the program. I plan to read the documentation and perhaps put together a few audiovisual tutorials on what I’m learning so far.
Indeed iMovie ’08 will be welcomed by many people who have been heavy users of the program, while for others it might appear seriously daunting to use like Final Cut Express or Pro.
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