I’ve been using iMovie since it first came out in 1999 on the then new iMac DV running OS 8. Ah, the good ol’ days. I don’t miss the slow speeds and memory limitations of the day, but this application was so much better than the clunky Windows app i’d been using. Back in the day, the backbone of my student-run video-studio at FACT were the iMacs, running iMovie, that 5th and 6th grade students used to edit their news packages that was later used as on-air B-rolls. By the time I was working on my master’s degree in 2001 I could crank out a video with all the titling, transitions and high quality background soundtrack from one day to the next. My proficiency was due in no small measure to iMovie’s dead on simplicity balanced with amazingly useful flexibility. But last night, after using the newest version, iMovie 08, I think they really went too far limiting the options and trying to move away from the timeline metaphor.

It probably didn’t help that the third-party program I had previously used to create great background soundtracks, Movie Maestro, was no long compatible with my OS (10.5 Leopard). Damn. That was a step in the wrong direction and I really didn’t have time to learn their follow-up app, Sonic Fire, so I was left to cobble together what I could from what I had on-hand with iTunes (Kevin Shield’s “Are You Awake?” from the “”Lost In Translation” soundtrack). Then there’s this move away from using a timeline.

Here’s a perfect example of what may intimidate one is entirely essential to another. I was at MacWorld last January when Steve Jobs went on about the brilliant engineer who couldn’t make a video from his scuba diving clips and so decided to redesign the app from the ground up. I was intrigued by the possible new features, but should have paid attention to the fact that I didn’t have a problem with the program and would probably not like the changes to basic editing metaphor. I was. I kind’a wish I knew what it was that was the engineer’s stumbling block, because the previous version seemed pretty seamless to me.

So, having used iMovie 08 on a project I can say that I like the one-click You-Tube upload and I liked how easy it is to get clips into iMovie. I was less impressed with the choice of transitions and titling and the fact that there are no compatible 3rd party plug-ins. For example, I would’ve like to have had an image from “Enchanted” over one of my shoulders while I was speaking about the movie but that’s not possible in iMovie (even though it was possible in the previous version using Gee-Three‘s great plugins! Argh!). So, I do have a copy of Final Cut Express that I’ve yet to use on a project, or maybe I just need to bite the bullet and go hardcore with full on Final Cut Studio. Of course, back when I bought my first Mac I got a copy of Final Cut (version two) and never did a damn thing with it because iMovie got the job done.

I know Morgan Webb and other video-bloggers use Final Cut Studio to do all the fancy over-the-shoulder graphics and Ken Burns 2D/3D effects. That’d be cool, $1,200 worth of cool. I wonder how close I could come to that using iMovie 06 with the Gee-Three plug-ins. Further study seems to be required. Or as they say in the media biz, “Stay Tuned!” JBB