I thought I would posts my thoughts on iMovie 3, if anybody's interested. I was up until almost 5am giving iMovie 3 a really good thrashing. I was procrastinating on my niece's wedding video until iMovie 3 came out. Some good stuff in it!
I'm running a G4/450 with 1.5GB of RAM and a Rage 128 pro GPU (so, no QE :( ) First off, and I'm sure this aint news to anybody who has tried iMovie 3, it's SLOWER than version 2. Windows resizing has the same glacial pace as iPhoto. Also, the playhead indicator on the timeline is REALLY jerky when playing. This is kind of depressing for me, as I had previously until now been happily surprised at how well my G4/450 was holding up to the latest Mac OS and other OS X apps. Seems the biggest CPU hogs on my drive are the iApps :-/ The "Edit Volume" feature is very welcome! Aside from the obvious use of dipping a music track below some dialogue, the "Edit Volume" feature is great for editing music, making smooth crossfades between edit points. iMovie 2 handled such chores very poorly, and the result was always choppy and in/out points were played back inconsistently! ARGH!! The titling has MUCH nicer drop shadows and there are a lot more types of titling, not that the selection of titles was shabby before... The "Ken Burns Effect" is GREAT, and was a big reason for me holding off on this wedding video. I put together a nice photo montage of the bride and groom, from birth to present day, using this effect on still photos my sister scanned for me (with slick ten frame Wash In transitions for each pic. Sweet!). It took me a while to get a handle on Apple's recent trend to [u]super[/u] dummy down these iApps' UI. Like, the interface is easy (of course!), but I was still using a mature computer user's approach when redoing an effect. I'd audition it (in the small preview window), tweak the settings till it was right, then hit the Apply button. The problem would occur when I wanted to redo it. I would DELETE the first clip from the timeline or use the Undo command (that's the mature computer user's thing to do, right?). And then, when I tried to reapply the effect with different settings? CRASH!! And crash... and crash :( Chalking it up to a major release's typical bugs, I gritted my teeth and pressed onwards... until I tried just REDOING the effect; NOT deleting (or undoing) and then redoing. BINGO! Worked like a charm! And this is what I mean by Apple "super dummying down" their UI. iTunes, being the first "iApp", doesn't have much of this, and neither does iMovie previous to this version, but iPhoto is weird in that, if you want to redo something, chances are you can just redo it. Period. Also, when you've done a contrast adjustment, or a Switch To Black and White process or whatever, you don't confirm the changes and save the picture via some dialog window with the computer; it just gets confirmed and "done" by virtue of you leaving the edit mode of iPhoto. The program assumes you're happy with it and you're moving on to other functions. No dialog windows. No "Are you sure" hassles. When compiling a photo album, there's no "Would you like to save changes to your photo album 'The Wedding', before quitting?" type of commands. The iApps makes assumptions, based on the end-users' behavior, which results in a much more fluid work process that is less intrusive to your efforts. Problem is, it's damned hard to unlearn the old ways! Also, I wonder if it invites dead-ends, or "no U-turn" situations in your altered media? Sure, iMovie still has what seems to be unlimited Undo, but it's sure weird for me, having used professional apps, where your every destructive move is questioned... And yet, in the new iApps, they are not. Heh... maybe these iApps are really setting a new standard for professional apps, as who better than a pro to know when they're done on a process and just "moves on" to the next chore in front of him? Also, it's too bad that, when you create a still frame from a video clip, that you can't apply the Ken Burns effect to it!!! COME ON, MAN! That KILLED ME! To do this, I had to take a Desktop snapshot of the frame I wanted (which OS X makes as a pdf file format), load it into Graphic Converter, save it as a jpeg (because iPhoto won't read PDF files... Even though PDF is EMBEDDED within OS X??!?!), and THEN drop it into iPhoto, switch back to iMovie and THEN apply the Ken Burns effect to it. HEAVENS TO BETSY! WHAT A KLUDGE! **sigh...** Anyway, the UI is beautiful, and with this release, I think I'm FINALLY comfortable with the brushed metal look, believe it or not. I was really ambivalent about it at first (slowly introduced since iTunes 1.0, three or so years ago), being so smitten with the clean, bright Aqua appearance. But, the brushed metal thing makes OS X look even more "real", yet more subtle, to me. Anyway, that's my �2 on it. ...MacDuff -- Mac Canada is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... 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