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Unlocking iMovie '09 & '11
Unlocking iMovie '09 & '11
Knowing how much fun David Pogue of the New York Times has with those video reviews he does, this comes as no surprise. I am just glad to see that he didn't sugarcoat it.
Apple Takes a Step Back With iMovie ’08
(Free registration required to read it, and all that.)
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November 28, 2009 at 12:05 PM
Well, this version of iMovie seems to have been designed by someone who has never edited non-linear digital movies before. Trying to find information about "insert edits" or, as you point out, "extract audio" are foreign concepts and while they are basic and fundamental processes to editing video, the steps iMovie now require makes you wonder if they have any clue at all about how to edit movies.
Having said that I am not a big advocate of sticking to tradition just because it is comfortable. I was trained to edit digital video on the Avid Media Composer many years ago and undertook feature length, 60 minute, and 30 minute projects on it and the Video Cube. Those platforms were unduly difficult and clumsy - very clearly they needed to be redesigned for ease of use to accommodate drag and drop and other editing techniques common to the computer environment we've grown accustomed to using.
A person should be able to easily "spit clip at playhead" for example or drag a clip or still image and drop it while leaving the audio track in place but these seem to be foreign ideas to the programmers causing one, again, to question their knowledge of editing digital media.
A person should be able to easily edit video and audio independently of each other in the timeline without having to export to Garageband, etc. and keep the tracks in sync. Hours and hours of valuable productivity are lost on tedious and unnecessary procedures resulting from poor software design and bad implementation.
In reality, there are a few fundamental elements to editing video, dialogue tracks, sound (ambient and effects), and music scoring and with elegant design it should be simple as easy as iPhone apps in collaging the elements together. iMovie '08 misses by a long shot and frankly 06 was better at basic editing procedure.