ZDNet Reviews iMovie

ajw1976 writes "David Coursey of ZDNet reviews iMovie in his 'Month on Mac' series. It's a pretty a good article that tells how easy it is to create a movie and burn a DVD." A lot of people seem to think home movies/photos/music (the Apple "Digital Hub") is the killer app for consumer Macs these days. iPhoto has a long way to go, but iTunes works great, and I've heard little but good about iMovie.

Comments

Re:Dead simple to use

[jeffehobbs]

However, ease-of-use almost always requires a sacrifice of power and complexity.

Wrong. Ease-of-use has nothing whatsoever to do with power, and complexity by itself is hardly a virtue. Some of the most fastest and powerful race cars in the world have a control panel simpler than your average low-end Toyota.

What Apple has done with iMovie is remove elements of video editing that are unnecessary for the average user, yet keep the ability to do 90% of what complicated high-end packages are able to do; and finally wrap the whole thing in an intuitive, graphically oriented interface. It's brilliant, high quality software.

~jeff

In defense of iPhoto

[daviddennis]

For anyone who doesn't want to spend hours tweaking and digitally redoing their photographs, iMovie reigns supreme. It's really easy to use, and the organizational scheme of rolls is simple and makes it trivial to find your pictures.

Even though I have a high-end camera (EOS D30), I've been very pleased with iPhoto as an organizational framework for my pictures.

D

Re:Complexity is a good thing?

[foobar104]

iMovie is movie making for the AOL crowd. FCP is for the, well, Mac crowd.

I agree and I don't. A division of my company does video integrations for broadcasters and post production companies. Two years ago those places were overflowing with Avids, a few Expresses but mostly Media Composers.

Now it's G4s with FCP as far as the eye can see.

Final Cut Pro on a Power Mac (about $6,000 total) is replacing Avid Media Composer systems (around $100,000) in professional settings.

I don't think anybody saw that coming.

New Virtix plugins for iMovie

[nedron]

Virtix has released plugins for iMovie (X and classic) that include both effects (Bravo) and transitions (Echo).

They were well worth the $39 I spent on them. You can see a quickie test I did with the "Sparkle" transition, which is basically a transporter effect.

I agree with everyone who says that iMovie is the best entry level editor around. For one-offs and quickies (like the above), I use iMovie and iDVD. For more involved projects, I own Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro.