iMovie 09 is much better, still maddening
A few weeks ago, I expressed exasperation upon seeing demos of iMovie 09, which seemed to be working hard to fix exactly the wrong problems. Now that I have it installed, I’ve been able to spend a few days playing around with it. And you know what?
It’s actually a lot better.
Yes, that could be damning with faint praise. iMovie 08 was terrible, a one-fingered monkey’s paw of doom. But iMovie 09 is genuinely useful and fun. The new themes are incredibly powerful; throw it a bunch of photos and you’ll have a slick slideshow in under 60 seconds.1 The filmstrip-like browser is a smart way of showing projects. In addition to new eye candy, many little grievances have been fixed.
To demonstrate, here’s a slideshow of some of my Africa photos that took three minutes from drop to export. Yes, it could be better, but the point is that it’s fairly competent even on automatic.
A big public thank you to all the Apple folks who clearly put a zillion hours into making it better.
That said, there are still a lot of little grievances. The interface is confusing at times, with a lot of unlabeled buttons, and contextual menus that only show up with a left click, rather than a right click. The only way to save a project is to duplicate it first in the project browser, so if you make a horrible muddle, there’s no going back to an earlier version. 2 I have no idea why Clip Trimmer exists. With the exception of very short clips, it simply lets you drag the handles you’d think you could in the normal view.
In short, iMovie 09 makes it easy to do very complicated things, and complicated to do very easy things.
By far the most maddening thing for me is iMovie’s bizarre alternative to a timeline, an unlabeled space I guess is called “Projects.”3 As I’ve already confessed…
Yes, I have the curse of knowledge: I know how an editing system is “supposed to” work, as it does in Final Cut, Avid and to some degree, the original iMovie. But I’m always game for a new and better idea, particularly if it makes heretofore complicated things easier for newcomers to understand.
This Projects space is a mess, no matter what your experience level. For starters, it wraps like a word processor. Every single piece of video you’ve ever seen on the web has had a playhead that goes from left to right. In iMovie, it goes left to right, top to bottom.
And I still have no idea why. It’s a fundamental decision Apple made with 08, and it persists. I wondered if it was to help people with smaller monitors, so I tried it out on my 13″ MacBook. Nope. It’s actually worse on a little screen. You see very little of your movie at a time. On a big monitor, you can make the area big enough to see most or all of a movie.
It’s not like a horizontal timeline is too complicated for the average user. GarageBand is nothing but a stack of scrolling horizontal tracks. (In fact, if you export a movie to GarageBand, you end up with a rough approximation of what the interface could be.)
Responding to the problem it created, Apple came up with Precision Editor, a genuinely clever way to visualize cuts and transitions that I hope and assume will gravitate up towards Final Cut Pro. I think they made the word-wrapping thing work as well as they could.
But it’s a good implementation of a bad idea.
For example, let’s say you need two songs to play — maybe you’re switching back and forth between them. In any other editor, this is trivial — you slice them up and put the pieces where they need to go, perhaps checkerboarding them. But, sticking with its word-wrap philosophy, iMovie only lets you treat music as an envelope wrapped around the whole thing. You can “unpin” music to slide it around, but if you’re coming back to a song six times, you need to add the same track six times.4
iMovie 09 does a lot of things right. Some of its choices, like keeping sound effects pinned to a specific frame, are smart. And many of its new bells and whistles, like video stabilization, will be a huge help.
iMovie 10 needs something resembling a horizontal timeline. It doesn’t even have to have “time” per se. Since iMovie makes everything magnetically click together, it’s not nearly as important that the horizontal scale represent seconds. Just give us a playhead that shows us where we are in the project and lets us line up simultaneous events. (The current version comes tantalizingly close at times, such as when you add picture-in-picture, so it’s clearly an achievable goal.)
The new version is good enough that I’ll certainly use it for some projects that I would otherwise do in Final Cut Pro. That’s a big reversal for me.
- Granted, it will probably look like everyone else’s slick slideshow, so do yours first. ↩
- True: iPhoto doesn’t have a Save command either. But you’re not likely to spend an hour tweaking a single photo. And iPhoto always lets you revert to the original. ↩
- If you hover over the double-arrow button that divides top and bottom, it offers to “Swap Events and Projects.” ↩
- Yes, you could do this in GarageBand. But the point of cutting to music is *cutting* to music. ↩
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February 4th, 2009 at 10:04 am
I think the Layout will make sense when the MacTablet arrives. And I don’t think that the Timeline is needed also. If you are cutting to music it even gets easier. Just drop in the Music and grab pieces of footage that are 4 Tabs, 2 Tabs or 1 tab long and arrange them. If you have a known time for 4 Bars, like, 2 Seconds just set the time and click at the point you want to go into the footage. a 2 Second Piece of footage will be marked. then just drop it into the Project and it will be solid to the beat. Afterwards just add some fancy stuff in FinalCut. Remember that you can export the Cut as XML and import it in FinalCut. I’ve done the last two Episodes of my Tattoo documentary with it this way and it worked faster for me that way. Drop in a beat-tight mix and export it to FinalCut to do the final Cut.
February 4th, 2009 at 10:31 am
“In short, iMovie 09 makes it easy to do very complicated things, and complicated to do very easy things.”
That really is the very best review for it, sadly.
February 4th, 2009 at 10:45 am
Sometimes you have just got to think different ;)
Vertical playhead?!
February 4th, 2009 at 10:56 am
iMovie’s inadequate updates are the sole reason why I’ve been downright reluctant to update iLife despite my desire to update every other app in the package, and terrified of buying a new computer because I know I’ll have to begrudgingly settle. I don’t even use my current version of iMovie, but it does include nifty effects and tricks I can export to Final Cut. I’d hate to lose them and have to pay extra to get them.
In general, that’s my whole beef with Apple products. I’d buy anything and everything they ever made, if they didn’t change things around so much that I have to keep buying the “new” accoutrements just to get the full deal because they decided the old ones (which worked fine to begin with) aren’t up to $nuff anymore.
Yeah. I said $nuff.
February 4th, 2009 at 11:38 am
I have not yet really tried iMovie’09 but I am already a big fan of iMovie’08.
IMovie had become increasingly complex, and it took an awful lot of time to do basic movies. Just because it takes time to de-rush your footage.
With iMovie’08 just released, I could do ten movies of a trip to Asia in the time it took me to do one on iMovie 6. And they are good.
The big bold move of iMovie’08 is that iMovie’08 (and I guess ‘09) exposes your content in a way that is just brilliant and allowed me to do movies I would never have done with former versions of iMovie or classic NLE software (like Final Cut Pro).
It’s not about how to make movies. It’s about your footage.
For the record, I happen to also use Final Cut Pro (I am not a specialist, and never used the surronding applications but I did some quiet complex editing with it); I like FCP but its concepts are complex. And iMovie before 08 was based on the same complex three-point editing,.
I really like iMovie’08 for its radical choice of simplicity, which is by far the best I have met for the movie hobbyist that I am. And it takes some courage to be so radical (very negative, angry reviews of users of previous versions of iMovie abound). And this radical simplicity as a high cost, just like the required transcoding of AVCHD footage, which surely irritates owners of AVCHD camcorders.
It is a very nice example of a product that requires a very strong vision and choices, which only companies with Apple’s maturity can produce.
February 4th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Honestly, I really like the wrapping projects window. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like a non-wrapping, horizontal-only view when searching for a particular clip — scanning is a lot easier if the start of clips line up, and there’s nothing else in the way — but I’d spend most of my time working with the clip once I find it in the wrapping view.
I totally agree about the missing Save, though.
I found Clip Trimmer very useful when I want to edit the length of a clip because it lets me see the clip I’m using in context within the original clip, and allows for slightly more precise (but not precise enough, really) cropping. I prefer to know what I’m doing before I do it: Dragging the handles around directly inevitably led to me dragging them back.
But there’s a few things I really don’t like in iMovie that you didn’t mention:
February 4th, 2009 at 11:57 am
Rereading my comment, I have no idea what I meant by “non-wrapping, horizontal-only.” Hopefully you do. :)
February 4th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
I’d argue that Avid uses a similar word-wrapping video project space in their timeline… but only when you are zoomed freakishly far into the timeline. The key is that it can also show itself as a one-line left-to-right configuration (you know, the kind we’re all used to?) and maybe that’s what iMovie needs to allow. But that would require rearranging things so that there’s ample room for the width of a timeline.
February 4th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Except of playing around with a few video clips I have no experience with iMovie (I ‘played’ in both ‘06 and ‘08) but if having to add a piece of music multiple times is one the main complaints, big deal. How long does it take to add a song two or three times?
February 4th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
“It’s not like a horizontal timeline is too complicated for the average user”
Well, I never understood how to use it. iMovie 08 is the first movie program I’ve felt comfortable trying out. The time line was a barrier to entry to me.
February 4th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Apple should really take a look at Sony Vegas for a very effective implementation of an editable timeline. It’s easier to use than Final Cut Pro without over complicating the interface. When you can do all your edits directly in the timeline you’ll never want to go back. The real innovation in iMove ‘08, as people have already stated, is the ability to catalog all your source video and scrub through it easily. If I Apple combine that with the power and ease of use of Vegas’s timeline I’d be a convert.
February 4th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Well I fired up iMovie 6 about 3 months ago for the first time and frankly delivered an edited set of clips that looked very amateurish. I fired up the new iMovie 09 and edited something that looked far better. I think those that pine for iMovie 06 like timelines and feel comfy because they’ve traversed the learning curve. iMovie 09 is what I’d recommend to my mother imovie 06 is what I’d recommend to someone who has edited video before. I think Apple took the right path here. The realtime features make my slowing 1.66Ghz core duo feel much faster.
February 4th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
What’s the background music you used for the slideshow (title/artist)? It’s really cool.
February 4th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
@ Bill:
It’s Ya La by Oumou Sangare (iTunes link). It’s from the soundtrack to The Nines.
@Jerome:
I’m really arguing for more simplicity. iMovie has to do a lot of juggling to make its weird word-wrap work.
@Steven Fisher:
Agreed on all three of your bullet points. Commands appear in really unexpected places.
@hmurchison:
I’m not pining iMovie 6/HD/whatever — the new version is much snappier, as it should be. But I think it could be simpler and more effective.
February 4th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
I was a genius with iMovie 2 through iMovie ‘06 / HD.
I could do everything with those, while Final Cut was cause for bafflement.
iMovie ‘08 really caused me a lot of trouble, and ‘09 hasn’t solved it for me. I can suffer with the hideous word-wrap timeline that scrolls when I don’t want it to scroll, but I really do need a keyboard shortcut for Split Clip At Playhead again. This nonsense of having to select a portion of the clip, fight the stupid scrolling vertically of the timeline, and then click Edit, Split Clip — this is killing me.
February 4th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
John you gotta smile more. =p
February 4th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
I’m actually giddy about the improvements in iMovie ‘09 over ‘08, which I also liked. While I’m adept at Final Cut Pro, and started with Adobe Premiere 1.0 (both created by Randy Ubillos, who did the demo of iMovie ‘09 at Macworld), the rapid workflow of these new iMovie versions is amazing. Skim a clip, pick a segment, and add it to the project — very easy. Then, repeat again and again. The tedious effort of starting a new project has been streamlined. Since the “Project” area of the window (it says Project right at the top of it) wraps, I’m able to see more of my sequence of clips than if I had to constantly scroll sideways or change the timeline zoom as I do in FCP. I really benefit from this, just as I benefit from word wrap on webpages, so I don’t have to scroll horizontally constantly to keep reading. And while I love Garageband, the scrolling-all-the-time is a PITA for me. But iMovie ‘08 had limitations that forced me to move my last project (50 min travel tour of the US; >15 songs) into FCE to finish it. Now with iMovie 09, I may need to move it back, since the image stabilization works wonderfully on some clips. While you said “…complicated to do very easy things”, were there any examples, other than the wrapping timeline (different, but not difficult) or the music example? Of all the things I’ve done with music in a movie, I’ve never thought to checkerboard two songs. I don’t think that’s a good example of a “very easy thing”. Actually, I’d say ‘08/’09 make the essential things (finding and selecting portions of footage; putting it on a timeline; previewing specific parts of the timeline) so easy that people take them for granted, forgetting how much more tedious and clumsy it is in older approaches, which themselves were pioneered by Apple’s Ubillos. I agree that ‘versioning’ on projects would be great. But early versions of iMovie only allowed one project open at a time, and now I can browse through all my projects, and all my footage, skimming with ease! I’m just really impressed with everything they’ve done with iMovie ‘09.
February 4th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
You have to leave behind anything you know or think you know about movie editing. Just grab this clip, then that clip then this clip and put them in order and add some effects. Who cares how long it is. Only when you care about hitting a particular time, or syncing to sound does any of that matter.
February 4th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
Thanks for the review … makes me want to check out iMovie 09.
February 4th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
In the last thread, I said I didn’t mind iMovie, but the last time I opened it, I realized that it was iMovie that I use. I remembered getting too frustrated with iMovie 08 to use it so went back. Thankfully, they didn’t delete it when you installed the new version.
And John, I don’t know if you’ve used much of iPhoto, but you can also export the same movie slideshow that you made. I’m guessing in iMovie you can manipulate it a little more, though.
February 4th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Ugh, I was one of those people who was apoplectic upon first opening iMovie ‘08. Absolutely hated it and immediately went back to the previous version. In the meantime I’ve begun using Final Cut, but I’m enough of an editing nerd to be curious about ‘09.
February 4th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
I enjoyed the review & comments – thanks John & others. Here I can only talk about my brief experience. I have never put a movie before until about 5 months or so ago using iMovie ‘08 (just because my 8-yr old son was bugging me to put his clip on YouTube). My first try was an overnight job & I thought was decent for a first timer, but after I’ve done a couple more I realised its many limitations I wanted to do better movies but unable to do so. I also have a Final Cut Express that I’ve not used, but as soon as I received iMovie ‘09, I used it for 2 consecutive nights (after work) to do his 2008 skateboarding highlights: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoLqTCNZhjU I was very pleased, it’s great (for someone like me anyway; but please note that the clip above is longer than 5 minutes but the songs by The Killers are cool ;-) My wish? Ability to highlight a part of clip then adjust its speed (slower or faster) of this portion only, easily blending with the normal speed portions of the clip. If you can already do this with iMovie ‘09 please let me know, I’ll be very grateful.
February 4th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
I meant iMovie HD.
February 5th, 2009 at 6:56 am
I’d like wrapping a LOT better if you could hold your mouse on the right or left side of any row and the movie would would flow right or left under your mouse as you hold it there.
In case that didn’t make sense I’ll elaborate. You are on any line of video and you are moving the mouse over that video. You get to the edge of the screen and to get to the next line you have to move down (or up) and then across most of the screen to get to the next moment. Doing this with your eyes is very fast but it is not so fast nor does the process flow with you having to do this. You have to suspend your thought about the movie while you think about moving the mouse to the next row.
Think instead of not having to move your mouse to the next line. Think instead of the video moving under your mouse.
This would make iMovie 8 & 9 (which I call iMovie 2.0 beta and 2.1 first production release) much better as you would not have to suspend your thought.
Taking it another step further. What if you could hold down the Command key at ANY point of the row you are on and the movie would start flowing under your mouse if you move the mouse to the left or right. The display under your mouse would have the video as it slides under your mouse but also a ghost image of something like a rubber band or arrow pointing left and right with a center point of where you were holding down the Command button. The further you “stretch” the mouse away from the center point the faster the video would slide to the left or right underneath it. Bring it back to the center point or let go of the Command button and the video would stop sliding underneath.
February 5th, 2009 at 7:40 am
I agree with vmarks. Not having a keyboard shortcut for Split Clip at Playhead has been a BIG drawback in the two most recent versions of iMovie. Most times I just return to iMovieHD and get the job done.
Dear Apple, I think we can handle the complexity.
February 5th, 2009 at 9:24 am
Dear Mr. O’Shea,
It’s not so complex: 1) right click at the point you want to split, and choose Split Clip from the menu, or 2) define any unused shortcut you want, such as control-T, in System Preferences’ Keyboard & Mouse Panel, on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, and specify iMovie as the Application, and Split Clip as the menu title. Hope that’s not too complex, and now you can get the job done.
Sincerely, Fake Apple Support
February 5th, 2009 at 9:47 am
@GregF: Select a portion of a clip, choose Edit->Split Clip, double-click the new clip to open the inspector, set speed of that clip.
@OlsonBW: Hold down the shift key (or press caps lock) when skimming off the end of a row. The cursor will be moved to the next/previous row for you, allowing you to skim in a single direction. BTW: this happens automatically when you are making a selection which crosses row boundaries.
@vmarks: If you right-click on a frame, the contextual menu has ‘Split Clip’ on it.
General Tip: Double-click a clip to open the inspector; double-click an edit (the space between clips) to open the Precision Editor.
February 5th, 2009 at 10:22 am
@MovieGuy08
[Quote]@OlsonBW: Hold down the shift key (or press caps lock) when skimming off the end of a row. The cursor will be moved to the next/previous row for you, allowing you to skim in a single direction. BTW: this happens automatically when you are making a selection which crosses row boundaries.[/Quote]
Thanks MovieGuy08. I’ll give it a try. I still like my idea better but …
February 5th, 2009 at 10:26 am
@Fake Apple Support
[quote]It’s not so complex: 1) right click at the point you want to split, and choose Split Clip from the menu, or 2) define any unused shortcut you want, such as control-T, in System Preferences’ Keyboard & Mouse Panel, on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, and specify iMovie as the Application, and Split Clip as the menu title. Hope that’s not too complex, and now you can get the job done.[quote]
This is a great example of this Application seeming to have part made by Microsoft and not by Apple. How in the world could they not think we would want/need a keyboard command to do editing? Yes we can create fixes/work arounds. They dropped the ball on this one.
February 5th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Thank you very much MovieGuy08 for that tip and others for discussions & tips on other things I’ve not even thought about!
February 6th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
@vmarks: There’s a menu command that does what you want, but it doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut? That’s what I think you’re saying, anyway. You can add a keyboard shortcut easily using System Preferences, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts.
Click the Plus, select iMovie from the Application: popup, then type the menu command in exactly. Add your keyboard shortcut. Close the preference pane.
In previous versions of Mac OS X, you’d have to restart the application for this to take effect. I don’t think you do anymore, but if you run into trouble double check your spelling (and capitalization) of the menu command, and restart iMovie.
February 8th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Dear John August,
In your recent iMovie 9 review you neglected to mention the fact that the Ken Burns effect problem, which first appeared in iMovie 8, continues to exist and plague iMovie 9.
Specifically, when using the Ken Burns effect in iMovie HD, the app will add black borders to a portrait oriented photo as you zoom out. However, iMovie 9 forces the selected section to be within the constraints of the photo size, causing the top and bottom of a portrait oriented photo to be chopped off.
I have read a few unconfirmed web reports that a few iMovie 8/9 users have attempted to use Apple’s Automator application to pad portrait oriented photos, before adding the photos into iMovie 9.
In my opinion, Apple should update iMovie 9 so that the Ken Burns effect problem is resolved. Until a fix is made available by Apple, I will continue to use iMovie HD for my needs. I welcome your comments to this matter.
Thank you!
Neil Garcia
February 9th, 2009 at 10:00 am
What I don’t get is why Apple would abandon the ’stripped-down Final Cut’ look. Wouldn’t you want people to get used to a vaguely similar interface? I went from HD to FCP with relative ease, I can’t imagine doing that quite as smoothly if 08 was my starting point.
February 9th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
I’m not violating any NDAs to state that FCP’s look will be changing in the next version.
Also, Apple truly doesn’t see iMovie as a gateway program into FCP, or even FCE. They mean for it to be a truly consumer product.
February 10th, 2009 at 10:32 am
@Stephen Fisher, @fake apple support,
The command in the menu does not do what I want. It’s “split clip” which requires selecting a clip first. The old way was “Split clip at playhead” – which means, splut clip right where I am now, don’t select anything first. Assigning a keystroke to that menu command as it stands does not help me one whit.
This ‘right click contextual menu’ nonsense may work, I haven’t tried it yet – but I’m suspicious and disappointed if it requires selecting a clip first. Also, no commands should be in a contextual menu that aren’t in the menus above. This leads me to suspect it’s just a copy of the useless command in the Edit menu. That, or Apple has failed on their HIG which indicates that items in the contextual menu must be in the menu bar above.
Either way, it’s bad.
February 11th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
simple question: when it’s so crap, why you’re still using it and give yourselves headaches? just stick to pro programs. everything that has half-eaten apple on it isn’t necessarily kick-ass.
February 12th, 2009 at 8:10 am
Thanks for the review. I bought 09 because it appeared to be equal to or better than 06 that I’ve been using. In 09, the inclusion of voiceover without the ability to intermittently raise and lower clip volume or background music volume within a long video clip, seems to be gross oversight, even in simple software for home movie novices. The new 09 features are not worth the hassle of trying to workaround the audio editing deficit, so I am very disappointed in Apple and I will go back to 06.
February 12th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
iMovie09 does need a timeline; bet there will be one for ‘10… you can’t beat 3mins for a build though & on the road sometimes that’s all you have to share w/ families & friends. also can’t beat the workflow w/ iPhoto, etc… fwiw: i actually find it easier to cut home videos in final cut pro (Mac). thx for the lil’ video show though; Africa is beautiful.
Cheers
February 12th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Why bother at all really? It’s a consumer toy. Final Cut Express and be done with it. But VASST and Vegas, long been kings in this prosumer area, easy scripts, yet with a polished look, that is customizable and doesn’t have the Apple Cookie Cutter feel about. Wish Sony and Apple weren’t such bitter enemies.
March 21st, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Very disappointing! I bought an imac on Tuesday of this week. After all the hype! I bought the hype! I bought for video editing. I have taken a giant leap backwards!
iMovie Sucks. I tried to purchase Final Cut express, but could not get a copy at purchase of the iMac.
My old windows Movie Maker is better, much better. No Timeline!!??
What kind of computer intelligence does not put a timeline in a video editor? Makes no sense. Almost useless!
Very disappointing!
March 21st, 2009 at 8:25 pm
All these years I hear how superior a mac is to a pc and when I buy one, right out of the box i have taken a giant leap backwards!
how ironic!