Ten Useful Features in iMovie ’08

I think it’s almost a forgone conclusion that iMovie ’08 is seriously lacking for many avid and experienced iMovie users. Just visit Apple’s own iMovie ’08 discussion board and you will see a long list of complaints about the program. And as you can tell in my last two articles about this program, I was not a happy camper either.

But playing around with iMovie ’08 a little more, I’ve discovered some useful features that may help users get more out of the program and edit projects a little faster.

1. Video Library: I think iMovie ’08 is great for podcasters and short video hobbyists who shoot lots of short segment movies. Because iMovie ’08 is not only a movie producing application, but also a digital management application, you can now use it to link to and organize all your movies on your hard drive right within the application itself.

Most avid users of iMovie wouldn’t dream to maintaining and archiving for long periods of time 10-30 gigs of source files that typically make up 1-2 hour long movies, but we certainly do have short family clips that we archive and would like to access for future use. Clips can be exported as Quicktime files and used later for web posting, DVD projects, and iPod movies. So iMovie ’08 is a great way for managing those clips and accessing them when needed.

2. Keyword Your Clips: This feature is also a part of Final Cut Pro/Express. You can keyword your clips similarly to the way you apply keywords to images in iPhoto. Again, this a great feature for managing and locating clips.

3. Expanded exporting features: Speaking of short clips, iMovie ’08 has a really nice feature for uploading your videos to the web. If you’re a dotmac member, you can upload your videos to your Web Gallery, the newest personal website feature for dotmac members. There’s simply little hassle is uploading to your dotmac Web Gallery, and now that members get 100 gigs of space, there’s little or no reason not to upload and even archive your short videos in your Gallery.

iMovie ’08 to YouTube: Next, there’s the direct export to Google’s YouTube. Now, if you think YouTube is just for the young web users, you’re wrong. YouTube is about free(!) video hosting where you can upload short 10 minute clips and not have to worry about bandwidth fees. iMovie ’08 makes it seriously easy to export your movies to your YouTube account. There’s little reason why you couldn’t create a video podcast or promotional video for your business. Or maybe you just want to post those crazy home videos that other people might get a kick out of watching.

4. Super Fast Scrubbing: When you put your cursor over the thumbnail of a video clip, you can scrub (skim) through that clip super fast, which makes it another time saving tool.

5. Cropping Feature: This is another Final Cut feature that you now get in iMovie ’08. You can actually crop out unwanted material in video clips just as you do with digital photographs. Now I wouldn’t advise doing this on very long clips, but it would work great on clips where you need a close-up of an object or subject in say a 15 second clip. You can also rotate clips as well with this feature.

6. Automation: Yet again another Final Cut feature (do you see where this going? Apple wants to prepare you to step to Final Cut Express or Pro if really want to do serious movie editing) which includes the ability to have cinamatic transitions automatically added when you add a clip or selection to your project. This of course also increases the workflow in getting a project done, and the process is a lot, lot faster than when it’s done in iMovie ’06.

7. Title Styles: The new title styles are very cute and appropriate for short run clips. These stylish caption titles are a great way to add additional information (web page address, phone number, instructions) to your clips. There might even be a way to produce your own similar title styles.

8. Color Adjustments: Now this is super sweet. With the color adjustment feature (also found in Final Cut), you can actually correct, for example, the White Balance in your video. Say you didn’t properly set your video camera for the proper White Balance. You had it set for Indoor WB when you were taking outdoor shots. Well, if the clip looks too yellow or blueish, you simply click on the Adjustment tool in the tool bar, and then click on the WB wheel. From there you click the white dropper on something white in the clip and it should correct your WB. The adjustment feature also includes exposure adjustments, including an automatic adjustment button that works similarly to the enhancement adjustment feature in iPhoto. With the Saturation control of this feature, you can also convert color clips to black-and-white or simply strengthen the existing colors in the clips.

9. Audio Adjustment: Okay, for some odd reason Apple took out the larger array of Fx audio adjustments in iMovie HD ’06 and replaced them with a down and dirty audio normalization feature which essentially adjusts the volume of all your clips so that their volume is at a 100%. Well, no big deal, but hey if you’re in a hurry to get a project done, then it comes in handy.

10. Favorite Clips: Finally, from my list of favorite features there’s the Favorite clips feature which comes in handy for quickly marking your best or favorite clips for a project. After doing that, you can select Favorites Only in the drop down button next where it says Show at the bottom of the iMovie ’08 program to have all your favorite clips presented to you. This is a sweet time saver in your workflow.

Now personally, I’ve already stepped up to Final Cut Express (which is what I was planning to do right before iMovie ’08 came out) for my own professional movie editing needs, but I’ll certainly be using iMovie ’08 for smaller projects that I want to quickly post to YouTube or my dotmac web gallery.