Just so you know, the radio silence around the [trailer competition](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/trailer-competition-update) 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](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/the-big-fox-deal) [stuff](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/home-from-africa) 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.