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iMovie ‘08

by Ian on August 30, 2007

in Apple, Video

Apple released iLife ‘08 recently. It’s been broadly well received, with the very notable and vociferous exception of iMovie ‘08 which has suffered from the severe disapprobation of the commentariat (thanks to Alastair Campbell for that term, by the way). iMovie power users everywhere are up in arms about all the stuff that is missing or different, compared with iMovie ‘06, the previous version.

You see, the thing is this. Apple ditched the whole way of thinking and working that underpinned the previous version. Someone at Apple decided, correctly in my opinion, that iMovie ‘06 was too hard to use for your average non-technical user. They decided to change the direction of iMovie to cater for this kind of user – which arguably is who the iLife apps should be targeted at.

Apple’s aim, therefore, was to make it very quick and easy to import a movie from your camera and edit it. Having done this, it they wanted it to be very easy to publish the movie so that people can watch it. With the exception of publishing to iDVD, they succeeded very well at satisfying those requirements. It’s to their credit that they simplified, rather than just adding bloat. There’s more than enough bloat already in the world of software.

I expect things like iDVD publishing to be added incrementally over time, as non chargeable updates to iMovie ‘08. I don’t expect to see timelines, timecode, audio track editing and other complicated stuff coming back. The problem with iMovie ‘06 was that it was neither a consumer app, nor a prosumer one. It was too hard for consumers to use, and too limited for the prosumers.

For the machinima that I’ve been involved with, I used (read: battled) iMovie ‘06 for a while, but subsequently upgraded to Final Cut Express, and have never looked back. Now, with this upgrade, I can finally use iMovie – in fact I have. I have published two videos of my family to the .Mac web gallery, in order to share them with family members.

Here’s a list of things that took me longer than editing either of these movies:

  1. Picking the musical accompaniment to the videos;
  2. Uploading the videos to .Mac;
  3. Cooking tea for two tonight;
  4. Writing this blog entry;
  5. Watching Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on More 4 tonight.

Viva iMovie ‘08!

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Tagged as: Apple, avchd, finalcutexpress, imovie, Video

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Buying HD video cameras…

August 19, 2007

One minute I had this normal life, and the next I was spending hours and hours doing screen capture from Second Life and trying to edit it, and on tight deadlines too!In a considerable hurry, I suddenly had to understand a whole lot of things about video – not least because the Apple video editing products I used (iMovie 6 and later Final Cut Express HD v3.5) only edit video formats…. So I learned about video, and I learned how to edit video.Given all this new experience, plus motivation generated by the imminent advent of the next Smith, I have decided to buy another video camera…. These are the Panasonic HDC-SD1, which records video in AVCHD format to flash memory, and the Canon HV20, which records video in HDV format to tape. They both produce 1080i video, although the Canon has a 24p option that produces 1080p output at 24fps for a more film-like effect.I should say, at this point, that while I’ve looked all over the Internet, the side that has generated the most credibility with me on this whole topic has been camcorderinfo.com…. However, recording to hard disk or flash memory has now become a very practical alternative and the manufacturers are starting to push a new HD format called AVCHD, developed by Sony and Panasonic.AVCHD is much less widely supported in editing tools – iMovie ‘08 and Final Cut Studio 2 support it, but (importantly to me) Final Cut Express doesn’t as yet. To compound the problems, there’s some doubt about AVCHD support on PowerPC Macs – Final Cut Studio definitely doesn’t support it on PowerPC, but I can’t find any hard info about iMovie ‘08. At any rate, such support for AVCHD as exists was introduced following the recent refreshes of Final Cut Studio and iMovie – it’s my uninformed guess that a refresh of Final Cut Express is in the pipeline. For the interim, there’s a $30 tool called Voltaic which will convert the AVCHD into Apple Intermediate Codec for editing in FCE.AVCHD is based on H.264 compression and while it supports bitrates of up to 24Mbps, the HDC-SD1 can only output up to 13Mbps…. As H.264 is a far more modern and advanced compression algorithm, one might expect better results from it, but it turns out that in the comparison done by the folks at camcorderinfo.com, the Canon outperforms the Panasonic on picture quality maybe due to the lower 13Mbps bitrate cap.

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