Just so you know, the radio silence around the trailer competition is not for lack of interest or intent. Stuff got very crazy, very quickly, and we had a hard enough time getting the real trailer finished up. (Plus there was other stuff going on.)
We have all the clips ready to go, but we’re going to delay the launch until sometime early in September. That will give people — the New York and Los Angeles people — a chance to see the movie. And it will give us about five seconds to breathe.
Because I’m a curious geek, I threw all the trailer competition footage into Apple’s new iMovie 2008. The good news is that the application seems optimized for MP4 footage — it was really simple to throw the clips together. The bad news is that the program is almost unusable, at least for anything beyond the most basic vacation footage.
Some frustrations:
- It freezes the last frame of every clip. My workaround was to use half-second dissolves on every cut, which is incredibly hacky and unacceptable.
- Only the roughest volume changes are possible.
- You can’t split audio from video.
- The spacebar works differently than any Quicktime application. It doesn’t play/pause. It jumps within the clip.
- It uses a text-selection metaphor for grabbing footage, which is innovative but really imprecise.
- The “handles” for marking the edges of clips work differently depending on which mode you’re in. It’s bewildering.
I really wanted to like the program. It demoes well. But it’s a disaster.