my name is mwd

John noted on his blog recently some of the outcry over iMovie 08 – iMovie has been totally revamped in its latest release. Indeed, it might well as be a totally different product. I can understand why those who liked iMovie HD, the previous version, are therefore upset, but I’m afraid to say that, in my opinion, taken on its own iMovie ‘08 is a far more fitting product for the iLife bundle that previous versions of iMovie.

Let’s start with iMovie HD, which has been replaced. It looked like this:

Previous versions of iMovie were like Final Cut Pro/Express cut down to a minimum. You had an editing window, you could arrange clips, special effects, and audio tracks in a time line. The used interface was very tidy, and reasonably easy to use, but it still was a reasonably technical program. iMovie HD is good if you wanted a traditional movie editing bit of software, but didn’t need the fancy features and therefore the high price tag.

iMovie ‘08 is a very different beast. It looks like this:

The work flow is very different here. At the bottom you have your library of all your clips, similar to your iPhoto library of photographs. You can select either entire clips or subsections from your library (which you couldn’t do in iMovie HD as easily) and then you drag them up into the project window at the top. As you drag clips into the project window, they’re played in sequence to make a movie. No need to understand about time lines here – your movie is just a sequence of clips in a project. If you want a caption you drag it onto the movie and the appropriate place and it appears like a little bubble alongside the clips it appears over. You can drag an iTunes or GarageBand file on for audio, and you can record a voice over if you like. You can drop transitions into your project. You can do all this in iMovie HD, but there you cut the timeline view and worry more about finding the bit you’re interested in on screen, lining things up right, and so on.

iMovie ‘08 is clearly not as flexible as iMovie HD was if you want total control over your movie, or more special effects and so on, but in return you get something that I think is much more accessible for non technical people to use. People who want to just take a few camcorder clips and put them together, cut out a few duff bits, and add some sounds and titles. iMovie 08 makes that so much easier, and that to me is what Apple’s iLife was meant to be about. iMovie HD was too complicated for that, iMovie 08 fills that gap.

Not that iMovie ‘08 doesn’t have its rough edges – the one time length fits all for transitions drives me nuts (you can hack around it, but you shouldn’t have to). But hopefully things like that will be fixed over time.

So, to people that want iMovie HD back, hopefully Apple will give you what you want, but not at the expense of iMovie ‘08. I think iMovie ‘08 is a cool product that does what iLife set out to do – make home media editing easy for those that don’t want to worry about that technicalities.