Comments on: A Detailed iMovie 08 Review, Part II: Wax on, wax off, or how to polish your movie.

By: Kurt Bigler

Kurt Bigler — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:26:46 +0000

I don’t find the iMovie “Video Adjust” to be of any use for my too dark movie. If I brighten it, I lose all the color. Meanwhile if I go in quick time player and make simple adjustments of Brightness and Contrast the result is great. So if iMovie is doing something “fancy” but can’t achieve basic results that quicktime player can achieve, that’s not a good sign. In my case it makes the movie unpublishable, unless I tell people to download it and tell them how to set Brightness and Contrast in quicktime player–not really a practical alternative.

By: imove 08 duration

imove 08 duration — Sat, 24 May 2008 23:51:35 +0000

[...] duration from the ….. IMovie 08 changes all that. Since finishing the review on Saturday I??ve …http://thesmallwave.com/2007/08/26/a-detailed-imovie-08-review-part-ii-wax-on-wax-off-or-how-to-poli…MacDailyNews - The New York Times’ Pogue on iMovie ‘08: What was Apple …… your clips laid end to [...]

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 15:41:00 +0000

Jeff,

I have 2GB and you’ll be fine. I do have a fast Mac, however, having just purchased one of the new iMacs. The thing flies on my machine.

I think the new iMovie is great. There is a learning curve, but it’s comparatively short, especially for video editing. I was amazed at how quickly I created that first movie.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 15:29:00 +0000

Thanks so much for these posts. I’m getting a new iMac in a few weeks and have 8 hours of footage of my 8 month old baby to edit and get on to dvd. The thought of learning Final Cut or even iMovie 06 makes me shudder; your description of doing this consumer level editing in 08 without reading the documentation is VERY encouraging, and you’ve made my mind up for me to ignore the naysayers and give this version a shot. Thanks again. Ooh - one question to anyone out there - will 2gb of RAM be good for this application, working with several hours of video? Advice appreciated!

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 16:24:00 +0000

Michael,

Excellent point about GarageBand for the soundtrack! If you think about it, this makes iMovie more like its big brothers Final Cut Express and Pro, who also farm out the heavy soundtrack editing to another application.

Regarding your tip, I actually tried that last night, but it wasn't clear to me it was extracting any sound (I received no indication of such).

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 16:21:00 +0000

Adam,

The learning curve is the hardest part with any software. From that perspective iMovie’s is relatively small. I am by no means an expert movie maker, but I am certainly familiar enough with it that I was able to get to the editing/polishing tools pretty quickly.

Honestly, if the iMovie defaults were not setup more for novices, it would have saved me some frustration early on. Once I got the defaults set the way I wanted, I found my rhythm. I’ve gone through another 2.5 hours of footage in less time than the initial hour I went though for the review.

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 16:16:00 +0000

Fixyourthinking,

I really like iMovie 08. Yesterday I “discovered” a 10 second clip of my daughter that I love. I would almost certainly NEVER have found that clip without a product like the new iMovie making it so easy (in fact, encouraging you) to go back and look at old movies.

Like most people (I suppose), I shoot a tape, load it up, make an initial movie of the primary subject manner, then store the tape and never get back to it. It’s too much work.

IMovie 08 changes all that. Since finishing the review on Saturday I’ve already gone though 2.5 more hours of footage from 2001 and have precious moments that I may never had had.

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 15:49:00 +0000

For fine tuning the audio, you can always import the finished movie into GarageBand and tweak the audio levels of the movie’s soundtrack to your heart’s content.

Also, here’s a tip (it’s in iMovie’s help, but not easy to find): you can extract the audio from any clip by simply selecting the clip and then holding down command+shift as you drag the clip into the project–only the sound is brought in.

By: adam

adam — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 15:38:00 +0000

Love your review. There’s been so much griping about iMovie ‘08 — mostly by people who took one look at it and decided it was too different from their expectations, and they simply lost interest.

I did what you did: I gave it a try. I took the random clips that iMovie discovered on my hard drive (mostly from my still camera in Movie mode) and made a little 2-minute video, just as an exercise. The results are here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnOFCWf-eCI

The project only took a couple of hours, including learning curve, and I was able to cut to the music, add relatively precise effects… I even sneaked in a virtually invisible music edit.

So count me among those intrigued and happy with iMovie ‘08 and its potential going forward. Bring on ‘09!

Adam

By: fixyourthinking

fixyourthinking — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 15:21:00 +0000

Thanks Tom … I’ve pointed several of my customers to your blog for this review. Many of them are frustrated … one asked me to buy it back from them because they hated the new iMovie.