iMovie '08: It's not that bad

I hated Imovie08....then I tried it for a bit....began to love it...the speed, the skimming. I only missed a couple of things (clip speed adjustment, more titles, couple of effects). In reality I started to whack videos together very quickly. I began to understand and love the new "library" of clips, skimming, and sharing between Ilife apps. Use garageband for sound...great. While I have FCP for complicated editing, I totally understood the easy throw together movie thing they were going for, fantastic.
Until one day, I worked on a project for five hours, tried to save(can't) because of this new "non-destructive" editing thing. I tried switching between projects a couple of times, figuring it would save the paths of editing changes I've made. "QUIT UNEXPECTEDLY"....what?( I've been reading about instability issues, I even made sure no other apps were running at the time) I reopened IMovie08 to find that I had just wasted 5 hours of my life (Thanks Apple). Just an empty folder in the Projects list?? "Don't worry about saving in Imovie08", says Apple. It uses "non destructive" editing so you can go back to where you were before"...unless it deletes our whole project..Damn it.
Been an Apple fan all along....just bought a new Intel Imac....very disappointed so far...Have had to call Apple twice so far( Garageband not installed correctly at factory, no apple loops / Now Imovie08 crashes, what good if this skiiming and quick editing if you work on something for four hours, can't save it BY DESIGN, and then in the end when you are just about finished, Imovie08 quits unexpectedly and loses your whole project) UGGGH...Why would they take a "save command" out anyway? How are you supposed to make sure you don't waste 5 hours of time. Never remember Macs being this unstable and quirky. Apple needs to send some updates soon....I'm not the only one having these problems with ILife 08 Apps......C'mon.

@34: Everything changed after 9/11. The time for coddling dummies is over and that extends to every part of American life. I'm proud not to be a dummy. Et vous?

I believe you mean it's gotten a bad rep, not a bad rap.

rep=reputation
rap=straight outta' compton!

@ 28: I'd learn to spell "brilliant" before going off on that kind of rant.

@33: You're an insulting troll. Go away.

Sorry, but you're all *still* wrong. If you thought IM6 was "too hard" you're just dumb and should dump the Mac and go back to Windows. Once again, we have a "review" of IM8 that talks as if IM6 made you hand-encode a transition overnight or something. Crimeny, people! You obviously have no idea how good you had it with the IM6 concept. Granted some of the features of IM8 are neat (cropping, etc.) and could easily have been rolled into a real IM update, but IM8 is simply a prettier version of Movie Maker. For dummies. Like you.

completely agree with your post. I'm loving iMovie 08. I used to hate waiting everytime I imported a clip into the workspace. Took forever and then to get it into the timeline etc.. The new iMpvie just seems a lot easy for me to get quick video work done. For something more advanced, I use Final Cut Express.

Having used iMovie 08, I can attest to its usefulness as a means to mash together a quick video; something that just can't be done easily in the previous versions. That said, it does have some inconsistencies, bugs, and is severely limited. Some editing features are harder to figure out than they were in iMovie 06. It should never have been called iMovie and should have existed alongside the past versions as a different product. My worst fear is that Apple will stop developing the old iMovie app as it is a much more capable product.

I still stand by my opinion at the movie I made about iMovie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guGh1GRkgUY

iMovie '06 is missing some [powerful features the old iMovie had, but has some powerful new features like color/exposure/contrast adjustment for clips that can replace a lot of filters you might have used to use.

As the author noted though, where the new iMovie shines is in starting out from scratch - it's far simplr to get just the parts of clips yoiu want in a movie, whereas before it took a lot more steps to basically carve away the parts of a clip you didn't want. Video clips are always too long, so making it easier to select subportions is way better.

Some hints for things you might be missing:

B&W filter? Select a clip and use the color editing tool to turn down saturation all the way - instant B&W. You can alter tones with the color balance sliders.

Need a few seconds of blank black screen (say before/after the movie) - drag a black gradient title to the front or back of your movie, and delete the text. You can make the "black" last as long as you like, and you can have titles attached to clips before or after the black extend into it by dragging the duration.

For advanced sound export a movie for use with Garage Band - I forget exactly what this option is called but it's part of export (I think export for Media Browser). Open garage band and import the video from the media browser. Then you can get as crazy as you want with audio, and export the movie to other places from within GarageBand. I agree this part is not at all easy to figure out, but it's very easy to actually do once you know how.

Want to speed up or slow down clips? Use the old iMovie to edit the clips down, then go into the iMovie project package (right click in finder and select "show package contents") and in the Media directory, you'll find the "Slow/Fast" clips that correspond to the video you affected. Import those into the new iMovie and you can use them with other clips. In general if you really need to use an old iMovie filter, that's a great way to get the effect you want and still use the new iMovie for most of the rest of the project.

Just think of the old iMovie as an effects processing engine until they get plugins added to the new one (which I think will come with Leopard).

Well I think you are right! iMovide 08 is not that Bad...It is Worse! That famous Apple employee that went to the vacation and came back with this so called "brellient" idea should be immediately FIRED! Since this person, single handedly have contributed to the unpopularity of this (one of the best pieces of productivity software that has ever developed). iMovie 08 is now in the Class of Microsoft MovieMaker and that is sad! Also it shows that Apple really ant to force people to buy the Final Cut Express! I will not buy the iLife 08 just because of this fact and I will stay with the iLife 06 for the time being!