Filed under: iLife
iMovie '08: Lacks support for plug-ins
A little green and blue birdie has been chirping in our ears about the new iMovie '08. Rewritten from the ground up, it seems to lack support for plug-ins according to this birdie. iMovie '08 offers just a handful of transitions and titles and a single color correction effect. It is nice for putting together basic video but you'll want to keep a copy of iMovie 6 on-hand for more advanced video projects, especially if you've invested in third-party plug-ins. No word from Apple yet on whether they'll update iMovie '08 for third-party plug-ins. Our birdie thinks the lack of plug-in support was an artifact of the new design and not an intentional act by Apple to drop plug-in support.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Matteo said 11:42AM on 8-08-2007
I still think some features of this suite will be fully "operational" once Leopard is released, as they might take advantage of Core Animation. But maybe I'm wrong and this is just a move to have more people switch to "Final Cut Express" or Final Cut Pro (I don't remeber if the express version supports a lot of plug-ins as the pro version does)
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Fraser Drew said 11:47AM on 8-08-2007
I think it will get a .1 version for leopard. Leopard brins a lot to the table for things like this.
Also, as it is a new product, it is a v1 release (kind of) so you expect things like that to come in the future... well i do!
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Paul said 12:00PM on 8-08-2007
Bought it, installed it, wish I could take it back. It's buggy as all getout, took an hour and a half to import my 30 GB project (G5 DC2.0 3GB, 1.5 TB) and then promptly quit out. It didn't actually import the project either, just the clips, meaning I'd have to start the project over from scratch.
Video segments that my mouse was not over were the targets of the scrub, and kind of random ones too. iMovie would randomly quit as well, and it's wasn't entirely clear if everything was being up-ressed to some kind of fake HD standard. Given that I don't have a camera capable of HD, this might be an issue. My 30 GB project swelled to 36 GB of clips. It duplicated and triplicated some clips, or at least the presentation of them for no apparent reason. These were unedited, un-split clips I'm talking about.
My Mac is in good working order, very few third party addons to the OS, just Divx and Flip4Mac neither of which was a problem before.
Good news: It backs up your copy of iMovie HD, and does not mess with prior projects.
My disappointments with iLife 08 also extend to iPhoto but that's for another thread. So far, I'm giving this an enthusiastic thumbs down.
For the first time since I've been with Apple, I want my money back.
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Jacob said 2:42PM on 8-08-2007
Can you guys explain how to install 06 and 08 on the same machine? that would be AWESOME! thanks
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mark said 2:31AM on 8-09-2007
Note the new iMovie installation leaves your previous iMovie HD on the hard drive. Also note that it requires a G5 at 1.9GHz or better or Intel processor, so G4 users are out of luck with this iLife app
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Chewie67 said 12:35PM on 8-08-2007
Three words:
Final Cut Express
If you really want to do serious movie work beyond simple cuts and slideshows, this is what you need.
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JOHN LONGENECKER said 12:37PM on 8-08-2007
iMovie 8
Does iMovie 8 have anything like
iMovie HD Timeline editing?
Thanks,
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Jon H said 12:41PM on 8-08-2007
No plugins, or no existing plugins?
There is a difference. It may be that there is a different plugin API, so old plugins won't work without rewriting.
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Chris said 12:52PM on 8-08-2007
Thank you for contacting Apple, we appreciate your concern. Regarding your issue, please purchase Apple's Final Cut Pro.
Sincerely,
Apple Customer Support
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osalom said 7:02PM on 8-08-2007
If you want to DOWNGRADE your current version of iMovie, ilife is available As of Today for just 79.99
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paul said 11:24AM on 8-09-2007
To install two different versions, move iMovie six to a new location (or a sub-directory in Applications).
Or, you can install one in the root Applications directory, and one in the user Applications directory. This is how I have done it in the past. I haven't tried with these specific versions of iMovie (don't have new one yet), but I have done it with Apple aps before. And it worked fine.
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JT said 4:56AM on 8-09-2007
When you install iLife 08, it creates a new folder in Applications called 'iMovie (previous version)' that contains the old application.
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Jeff Weitzman said 1:35AM on 8-09-2007
Just got to play with iMovie for a bit at the Apple Store Palo Alto (which was sold out of iLife and iWork!)...
At first it seemed like a lot of the editing power was gone, but as I started to figure things out, I think iMovie may be a real breakthrough product. For example, it seemed at first that without a timeline, there was no way to precisely edit music. But I discovered how to get into the soundwave editor, where you can use the same intuitive tools to select and move the audio around as you can with the video clips, all while watching a real-time view of the video.
It's a very different paradigm than the traditional timeline-style editor, but I think that after some time spent it will prove to be very intuitive. For new users, who haven't ever created their own movies before, it might be amazing. We'll see, and there's no doubt that this new iMovie has some maturing to do, but Apple may have just moved laterally onto a path for video that will take them much further with consumers in the long run.
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Christopher said 9:00AM on 8-09-2007
So from what I'm reading above I can have iMovie HD retained and I am still able to work on current (and future projects) with iMovie HD if I choose to despite loading up iMovie '08... in other words I would have TWO iMovie programs to work with, correct?
I would hate to have to move to this suite of apps, and lose what I like about iMovie HD, despite the fact that iMovie appeals to me to try for some future projects...
Any comments?
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Bill Numerick said 3:19PM on 8-09-2007
Yes you can use iMovie HD and the new iMovie '08. It creates a backup of the old version in your application folder.
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SC said 7:46AM on 8-10-2007
Wow, this is the first time I think I have ever gone backward having paid money for an upgrade. I am trying to pull in a movie I have been working on for about two weeks in iMovie HD, and iMovie 08 keeps bombing out. The movie is about 20 minutes long, lots of photos, old transitions, a bunch of music set at differing levels, etc. iMovie 08 can't handle it. I am absolutely blown away - it doesn't work. I am actually thinking about uninstalling it. What happened to the old Steve Jobs who was fanatical about quality ! The total re-write, well that is pretty nifty - who really cares ! I want to be able to do more in iMovie 08 than iMovie HD not less - upgrade - get it. WTF ? I must be missing something. Where can I edit my audio tracks? A lady at the Apple store told me I had to take my movie into Garage band and edit the audio there. I can't exactly do it the way she told me. If this is any indication of the Leopard upgrade, then we are in trouble.
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fotoram said 12:47PM on 8-10-2007
"Wow, this is the first time I think I have ever gone backward having paid money for an upgrade." Hey SC, I can understand your disappointment with a totally new product. I think that iMovie '08 was developed to get more consumers into video editing. While I think that iMovie '06 reached an awesome pinnacle as far as video editing for consumers, it became a little too difficult for the average person who just wanted to download their home video and send it out to aunt Lucy. There are a lot of really neat features in iMovie '08 and it will allow many individuals that are new to video editing get into the game. But, for the serious video hobbyist, the change was too drastic. I think that is why when you upgrade, iMovie '06 is still left on your drive. BTW, as a professional video editor for over 15 years, never upgrade to a new version in the middle of a project. It's just asking for trouble. This is coming from unfortunate experience. Anyway, keep working on iMovie '06 for your projects and get to know iMovie '08 and it's new way of doing things, you might be surprised! Take care.
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wdympcf said 7:17PM on 8-10-2007
I think that fotoram is right about Apple trying to target a wider consumer audience (one that to easily be able to make quick movies - not edit 4 hours of raw video down to a 20 minute clip). In order to target this broader audience, Apple decided to include support for more than just DV and HDV video formats. Many consumers have or are buying HDD camcorders, flash camcorders and DVD camcorders. These typically use MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 encoding.
MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 are much more difficult to edit than DV as they are highly compressed formats. Thus rather than having the DV user experience iMovie '08 with video effects and the MPEG-2 user experience it without video effects because the processing overhead is too high, Apple chose to create a consistent user experience for all users. The unfortunate consequence of this is that DV users now lose out on the ability to edit their footage.
It might be possible that Apple is trying to develop algorithms to allow for more advanced editing of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 clips, and that when they do, they will bring back some of the effects. But, chances are, that they chose to give up on effects driven editing when they chose to support MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 formats
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marcus said 1:51PM on 8-11-2007
i really hope that they bring back timeline editing + video effects to '08.
the core video filters + effects should not have required a rewrite since they are a built in part of osx.
i installed the new imovie before i realized that those two features were left out.
total let down.
back to imovie HD
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Karel De Bevere said 9:29AM on 11-02-2007
I want my money back
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