| Monday, August 20, 2007 |
09:19 - Bring some new bathwater... and a new baby
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I haven't played around much with the new iMovie, but reading some of the horror stories and cautionary tales about it has prompted me at the very least to go download the old version in case they have a change of heart and try to eradicate it from the world of the living.
But that said, there's apparently a lot to like about iMovie '08 (uh, is this the first time Apple has given in to the much-maligned practice of naming a product after a year that won't begin for another six months?). Damien Del Russo e-mails:
I've read a couple of the reviews of iMovie '08, about people complaining about lack of volume control, lack of explicit timeline, etc. And those are valid, it will be nice to have them again.
But DUDE. Real time scrubbing of every video in your library? Real time dropping of transitions? Real time "Ken Burns" over photos? That is SO MONEY! I was making a video this weekend, and it was so sweet to be able to scrub back and forth and just jump around to all the videos in our library + photos. No more waiting.
Now I'll admit it did crash about 5 times on me. But I think it's because I was working SO FAST. I love it. Now I don't use Final Cut so maybe that's where the real action is or whatever. But for a basically free program, iMovie '08 is perfect for me. WAAAAY better to work with than the older version.
Note, this is largely because I cut a LOT of photos into my videos, and all those transition renderings used to really slow down the process.
Anyway, to see an example, I have one at my .mac: http://gallery.mac.com/ydelrusso#100000
I'm poking at it now, and it looks like the Great Big Idea that Apple had this time around was real-time thumbing through audio-visual content as you drag the mouse over a thumbnail of it; that behavior is showing up all over the place, in iMovie, iPhoto, iWeb, the Web Gallery, everything. It's this year's "show a big translucent indicator of where you are in your Library as you scroll rapidly through it (which showed up everywhere from iPhoto to the iPod to GarageBand). Admittedly, it's very slick. Indeed, it's fun. Even if I'm not producing anything, it's fun to play with. But Apple's been doing that since the IIgs, so it's nothing that novel for them.
What I find hilarious, though, is this:
Egad! They finally found a practical use for the Genie Effect!
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Brian Tiemann
