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iMovie For Free
Graymalkin writes: "Apple has finally released iMovie (the really easy video editor) for the non-iMac DV customers; the best part is that it's free. You can get it over at iMovie's
Web site. I've used demos of this package and compared to professional packages like Premiere it really packs a punch. You need OS 9 and at least 64 megs of RAM (unless you want to do Web quality video, then 64 is fine). It's nice to see Apple responding to their customers (like myself) who wanted iMovie but didn't want to go out and buy an iMac to get it. fnord. "
The difference is that Apple is not bundling this program with the operating system. The problem with Netscape/IE wasn't so much that IE was free.. It was that IE was bundled with every computer that ran later versions of Windows 95 and all version of windows 98 (as well as NT/2000). Why would someone who isn't very computer literate download and install netscape when they already have a web browser pre-installed?
There are two that come to mind - but both are for animation of 3d graphics, not for real video per se. The good parts is that they're decent packages, so sometimes you can't tell the difference.
One is called blender, and the other is called 'moonlight'. Blender is free as in beer only, and I'm not sure about moonlight.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
This wasn't so much altruism on Apple's part as practicality.
The software is easily availiable everywhere on the net, their automated update isn't particularly good at discerning Mac models (and can be fooled easily if someone cared) and it's not like the software can be used on anything but Apple hardware anyway.
Finally, the ability to edit digital video isn't much good unless you can get *at* the digital video so what you're really getting is another incentive to buy a Firewire (aka 1394 aka iLink) Mac.*
So they've eliminated the qualifier-hassle and given folks more reasons to buy their Mac's, particularly ones with Firewire. This is much like when they shipped the original Macs with a software suite (MacWrite, MacPaint, etc.) to show off their capabilities.
Lastly - it's not entirely clear that Apple *wanted* to give away the software or it just wasn't able to get the qualifiers to work.
-- Michael
*Trust me, if you really just want to edit down the family video so they look less like a 'Cops' episode and more like folks enjoying themselves you'll want onboard Firewire.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Where will I get 64 megs for my Coco 3?
I've demoed iMovie for some 10 consecutive weekends.. Even if we leave the machines on during the weeks, we have _all_ the material we make during the weekends left. No corrupt files and close to 8 GB of filmed data.
This in om a standard iMac DV, 10 GB HD and 64 MB RAM. We didn't have to reinstall anything, and a Mac standing alone in any store is a sitting duck for malicious PC-using teenagers.
If you want to separate the audio från the video, that's easily done in the QT Player. And.. Digital Video do take a lot of space on your hard drive.. there's no way getting around that problem. 10 GB (inkl OS and other programs) is sufficient for close to half an hour of film, and that's about 15 times as much as one should when you edit.
Any sane person will see that editing 2 minutes of film at once is too much. A clip shouldn't last longer than about 10 secs anyway. And when you're done with the clip you just store it away on you camcorder again.
Those 8 GB of film we had.. I tried to mount it in iMovie at one time.. worked great.. no problems! 64 MB of RAM is enough. More clips doesn't seem to effect the RAM-usage att all. But.. i severely impared the editing process with hundreds of clips, and that's why it's silly to try to edit 15 mins of film at once.. That's just plain dumb.
iMovie is very competent if you know what you're doing. But there's no question about iMovie being short of features. But again.. If people use AppleWorks (or Paint and VX) for editing their photos.. iMovie is more than enough for the average user.
- Henrik
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
I currently own a beige G3, and while it was fine for its time, it certainly could use an upgrade. I really wanted to try iMovie, but I didn't want to buy an iMac due to its limited expandability and the small monitor it has (my beige system has a 19" Sony).
Now I can have my cake and eat it too - I can get a G4/500 or thereabouts, AND get to play around with iMovie for free. That's a great deal, since I tried out iMovie in the store and was pretty impressed. Before this, I might have bought a much cheaper iMac just so I could play with iMovie; now I'll probably buy a G4 at double the price.
Of course I don't think I'll buy the G4 until MacOS X comes out, so I can have a fully MacOS X ready computer without the tiresome trouble of upgrading. I wonder how many people like me there are; it might pay to buy Apple stock and watch it take off when people buy their new MacOS X toys.
D
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I downloaded Broadcast 2000 a while back and it was looking pretty Promising - Try:h tml
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/01/10/1740256.s
and:
http://heroine.linuxave.net/bcast2000.html
Cheers -
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
iMovie really only reads DV streams, because it's designed for turning raw footage from a DV camera into finished, exportable work. It is possible to get old footage into DV format without having a Firewire port (usually with some small loss, remember that DV is 4:2:2 compressed). There's discussion on the Mac and DV sites on how to do that.
Most of the limitations of iMovie are there to keep it simple to use for people who don't want to learn all the background of video editing (especially traditional analog). You can probably do what you're looking for with the combination of the "Quicktime Pro" upgrade and iMovie, but to really get into professional editing you still need Final Cut Pro. For Apple to release iMovie for free is probably as much a loss leader for upgrades to QTPro and FCP as anything else. Both packages are extremely powerful, though, and pretty much kick butt on Premiere, After Effects, or anything else that's been available in the past (according to a friend of mine who runs a University video lab, anyway).
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
Iee-yiiee-yiiee
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Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
The iMovie requirements are over blown; any computer with OS 8.6 or higher and 64 megs of RAM will work just fine; iMovie also supports (most) FireWire PCI cards and Ethernet.
What is it with Apple these days (and every other software manufacturer, for that matter)? The screenshots of this program, except for the handle Apple menu bar at the top, look like they could've been taken on any system. Why can't software manufacturers design programs that actually use the interface of the system they're being used on? Why does a Macintosh program have to look like a strange new foreign interface and why does Microsoft's new Media Player have to look like a retarded Pocket PC or something? This is especially disconcerting coming from Apple, which has made great headway in the designs of consisten UIs that make people feel at ease. I do not want to have to learn a whole new set of of UI images, methods, and layouts every time I open up a new program.
Sheesh.
Credits are created almost instantly if you feed a properly formatted text file directly into QuickTime. You can then take the resulting movie and drop it into your project in under a minute, including setting fancy effects.
As to crashing while MacOS 9.04 isn't going to set records for stability it's probably the most stable MacOS in years (and more stable then Win9x.) I'd suggest taking a look into your settings and see if there's not something odd someplace (patched a few too many traps in the system with 3rd party add-ons is most common.)
You'll also learn to save before doing anything dramatic with any editing package on any platform. This will become second nature to you eventually. Indeed I've seen professionials who freak out if they can't do their usual cycle of save-sip coffee-plan the next step-resume (not naming names.)
-- Michael
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
"you need OS9 and at least 64 megs of RAM, unless you're doing Web quality video, in which case 64 is fine."
Huh? Do you need 64 or 64?
My journal has hot
2 week old news. Actually it works with System 8.6 or later. There is a report with user experiences on Macintouch, including a lot of hardware compatability data.
--Dubbing video over another video segment and keeping the original audio.
--Taking audio only from the video footage.
Also, the sound effects that it has don't move with the movie track when you add another clip, and they're had to put back into the right place. The worst, however, is that iMovie has crashed several times, and it doesn't haev an auto-save feature. You lose EVERYTHING since your last save, which makes things time consuming. Adding credits can take upwards of 15 minutes, and if you lose that, a lot of time is wasted.
Just my 2 Euros.
~AgentRavyn
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A requirement of creativity is that it contributes
to change. Creativity keeps the creator alive.
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I'm an exhibit on the mounted animal nature trail.
I've used demos of this package and compared to professional packages like Premiere it really packs a punch.
Oh I heartily disagree. iMovie really is missing some crucial functions that any good video editing app shouldn't be without. Namely, there is very little in the way of audio manipulation. You can't separate the audio and video tracks of a clip, period. This might sound like an advanced feature but you'll be surprised how much you wish it was there even when making simple vacation movies for the family (I did).
Memory managment is horrid; during our last project our 15 minute short movie gobbled so much RAM and hard drive space (and we have 128mb) that it ended up literally frying the computer; I had to reinstall MacOS because iMovie had thrashed some system files. This is just not cool.
I think iMovie is a neat little app, but it doesn't leave you very much leeway in the editing process. In other words, you can create a good movie, but you have to time your shots just right and be sure that the audio is just as you want when you are actually filming. There isn't much in the way of dubbing and clip editing to help you out.
On a related note, what is everyone's experience with FinalCut Pro. I was using Premiere for a while, but on Mac it's more like an ugly port of a PC app than a good package. The DV support in Premiere is horrid unless I'm using it completely wrong. What do people have to say about FinalCut on iMac?
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
What part of a DV stream do you consider closed, incompatible, and unsupported?
iMovie is designed to edit DV Video, you can convert the finished product to QuickTime but you can also convert it to MPEG, VHS or whatever you want.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America