| Tuesday, December 10, 2002 |
13:29 - They just don't get it
http://www.dvineducation.org.uk/imovie2vmoviemaker2/index.html
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There's been a lot of talk lately about Microsoft's new Windows Movie Maker 2, currently out in beta. This version improves over the ghastly (and that's not just my opinion, here) first release by adding features that iMovie users have been taking for granted forever, but which Microsoft inexplicably showed themselves completely clueless about. For instance, WMM1 was a lossy editor-- any DV clips that you chopped up and sequenced were chopped up in the filesystem, and effects and transitions that were applied to the video stream were not rendered as separate DV clips and catalogued internally, but were applied directly to the DV media and non-reversible. This meant you also couldn't output pristine media back out to the camera. They treated it though it were an image editing program, not a digital video studio. In other words, "MS Paint for Movies". Pretty hideous, by all accounts.
But WMM2 aims to change all that, and now it purports (with a lot of confrontational fanfare) to be more than a match for iMovie, both in terms of feature set and of ease-of-use.
I've been seeing some rapturous reviews of WMM2 lately, some from tech-pundits who had previously been enamored of iMovie, but who now were firm converts to the world of XP Green and Orange and Beige and Dark Blue. They lauded the fact that you could now publish movies to the Web or burn to DVD; that it supported analog as well as digital video input; that it came with tons and tons of transitions and effects; that it explicitly touted the "task-based interface" as a big usability advantage. And of course they lauded its use of Windows Media Player format, which everybody knows is better than anything else.
Well, naturally I found this all pretty dreary and bleak. Having no machine around here on which I was willing or eager to try out WMM2, I figured I'd just sit back and wait. And it turns out sanity has begun to reassert itself, now that more adventuresome hands than mine have given WMM2 a long hard look.
It turns out that these reviewers I mentioned, who made such a big deal out of WMM2's wizard-heavy task-based interface, were missing one key, crucial component of what would make them good reviewers of a piece of software of this sort: They were not creative people. The reviews I've seen have all been from techno-columnists, people accustomed to evaluating products on the basis of feature-set checklists and price rather than on how well they actually work.
And now we have the other side of the coin. David Baugh has put up a site which examines Microsoft's side-by-side comparison of WMM2-vs-iMovie features (a favorite Microsoft tactic, which we all remember from back when they used it to trash Apache, by including patently asymmetrical, irrelevant line-items like "Integrated SMTP server" and "Microsoft® Active Scripting™®" to pad out their column of checkmarks)-- and deconstructs the underlying insidiousness and weaselry of the associated marketing-speak.
Baugh, you see, is a creative professional-- in fact, he runs a site called Digital Video in Education, and he teaches courses in how DV can be used to enhance creative learning. He can fairly be considered more of an authority on the subject of making digital movies than some ZDnet columnist, it seems to me.
And his insights are worth noting. The site is pretty sparse, but the kernels of the comparative virtues of the two programs are sensible and valuable. For one thing, WMM2 represents just how clearly Microsoft continues not to understand how to write software that can integrate into a creative person's workflow. The "task-based interface" that makes up so much of Windows XP's ease-of-use hype-- with "wizards" that guide you through prepackaged task lists with minimal and constrained user input, and with lots of transitions and effects offered but no way to control or tweak them-- seems like a good thing, and for a reviewer interested only in checkboxes, it is. It means Microsoft gets to claim superiority in moviemaking products, and people using WMM under XP can feel nice and secure that they don't have to get a big bad Mac in order to make DVDs of little Billy's third birthday party.
But this doesn't help people who actually want to create their movies.
The strongest testimonials Apple has been broadcasting about iMovie over the past three years center around the idea that once you start playing with it, it's fun. It's about shuffling your clips around, snipping them up, joining them together, trying different effects, tweaking transition times, dropping in soundtracks and playing with the fade in/out speeds, applying various kinds of color-correction tweaks to the video, and then, finally, after several hours of honest and exhilarating work, you get to press a button and save the movie for the Web or e-mail or DVD, and sit back and enjoy the feeling of accomplishment.
Microsoft thinks that instead, people are going to want to plug in their cameras, put all the clips in order, select a few prepackaged effects (that can't be tweaked for speed or direction or delay), and then go through a wizard and let the software tell you what your options are so it can do all the editing. It takes the "creative" part out of the creative process. It exemplifies Microsoft's desire to internalize functionality into the software back-end, while minimizing the input of the user, and giving back something that most users will consider "good enough". But will they find the process fun?
I can tell you right now that if I had to edit my movies in a piece of software that made me have to think about software, or about tasks, rather than about video clips-- I'd pack up my DV camera and never dig it out of my closet again.
Apple gets it. They know what users want; if a user wants to do something creative, something that involves putting a piece of himself into the content the software creates, Apple realizes that the software must allow the user to do whatever he wants toward that end. It must allow experimentation, mistakes, do-overs. It must give the user complete control over the media, while hiding the esoteric details of what files and folders and functions and formats are being used, far into the background. It must present the content in as raw a form as possible, letting the user interact with it on its own terms. This is art, after all, and no artist wants to be constrained by artificial limitations on his tools. Instead, he wants to think only of his media and his vision of the final product. iTunes exemplifies this: rather than making users think about "MP3 files" and folders and long multi-word filenames, iTunes organizes music based on artists and albums and titles and genres. It doesn't invent any metaphors; it lets the user use the metaphors he's already familiar with, metaphors that are patently appropriate to the media in question. iPhoto does the same, letting the user think in terms of pictures and rolls and albums. This isn't a "task-based" interface, it's media-based-- and that means that a person can figure out how it works by sitting down and playing with it for a few minutes. And he'll have fun doing it, too, because without any wizards or menus to contend with, it won't seem like he's working with software. It'll seem like he's working with his media.
Programming is an art. Would you want to program in a "task-based" Visual C++ environment, one that led you through wizards and asked you what kind of program you wanted to make, and then wrote all your code for you? ...Okay, bad example. Some programmers probably would; heh. But any self-respecting coder who takes any personal pride in the code he writes would simply not trust such a tool. For formulaic tasks that involve no creativity or flexibility, like setting up TCP/IP, the task-based interface metaphor is fine. But for anything that involves creativity, innovation, experimentation, or the imagination of the user-- the task-based interface is quite possibly the worst possible metaphor to employ.
iMovie could in fact stand to be made easier; and it will be, as soon as iMovie 3 comes out, which should be within a few weeks, if the rumors are true. But one thing I know for darn sure: Apple isn't going to make it "easier" through the use of wizards and non-tweakable pre-packaged effects and a "task-based interface". They're going to focus on what makes iMovie so much fun in the first place: the ability to plug in your DV camera, press Import, let all the clips roll into your on-screen palette, and then sit down for a couple hours of focused, zoned-out, dead-to-all-outside-stimuli creativity.
And even though they might control all the software development resources in the known universe, Microsoft just can't seem to grasp that small, simple kernel of truth about software design: software that you have to think about is software that fails.
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