iMovie 08, A First Look

The new iMovie is a radical departure from the prior versions. Some of the changes are innovations, some are elaborations of the existing iMovie functionality, and some repackage equivalent functionality with a different look-and-feel. Some of the new features, I have longed for since I began editing video. Some feel awkward and inefficient because they require unfamiliar ways of working. And some are improved versions of things I haven't yet found a reason to use.

I need to give some of my own background so that the reader can better understand the context in which I judge a video editing system. I've been using iMovie since version 2, have processed more than 80 hours of DV clips, and am in the process of digitizing and re-editing a like amount of Hi-8 analog video. The previous iMovies feel designed to produce videos in which all the footage is available in relatively continuous form on one or two videotapes. It is straightforward to produce a DVD that covers a single coherent event: a wedding, a retirement party, a Little League game, where the bulk of the video clips fit the single topic. The flow of media looks like this:

iMovie 04, iMovie 06 are designed to work with a single project which contains video files.

However, most of the video I shoot is relatively short and multi-topic: some candid shots at a family get-together, views on the hiking trail or while birdwatching, a panorama of flowering trees in our garden. All of these are interspersed on the video camera tape and get imported together whenever I am prompted to get the latest footage from the camera. The process that I have developed to handle this multi-topic video is shown in the Figure below. I maintain several in-progress iMovie projects (e.g. Family, Travel, Garden) into which I disperse the incoming clips according to the topic. The process is semi-automated in that the incoming video clip files are renamed by an AppleScript so that there are no name clashes (e.g. trying to put two files, both named Clip 01, into a merged project) and that I can later determine which videotape the original footage is on. But I still use the Finder to drag the clip files from the Media folder in the original project to the folder in the merged project. Once I collect sufficient material, I will produce a participant (pt) DVD, so designated because participants are much more willing to watch detailed footage than are non-participants. My grandson will watch every minute of a basketball game in which he plays, but his great-grandmother prefers only the highlights, so a more-intensely-edited non-participant (npt) DVD is also derived from the participant project. To accommodate these requirements, my media flow looks like this:

Flow of video from camera to "finished" projects using iMovie 4 + home-grown utilities.

The media flow in iMovie 08 allows clips to be distributed to projects and for the same clip to be used in several projects, which obsoletes my home-grown utilities:

iMovie 08 works with multiple projects, which reference video files arranged in events

User Interface Comparison

The iMovie 08 interface discriminates between events which contain the raw video footage and projects which represent trimmed and edited clips extracted from one or more events. The interface is much more configurable than previous iMovies and contains a lot more explicit information.

iMovie08 Interface

The iMovie HD and predecessors had a relatively static configuration. You were either working with clips:

iMovie 06 using clip viewer

or you were working in the timeline:

iMovie 06 using timeline viewer (also used for audio)

I haven't enough space or time to go into all the details that differentiate the two iMovie epochs, but I'll summarize a month's experience:

Nice New Features

The new import functionality of iMovie 08 seems to implement most of what I need to handle the import of multi-topic videotapes.
The idea of fine-tuning a project clip to make it either longer or shorter is good, but the implementation has some problems with long event clips (see below).

Uncomfortable or Missing Features (in no particular order)

It's awkward to play less-than-the-project full-screen. There's a tension between wanting lots of screen real-estate for viewing clip thumbnails and having a large video image. When I'm actively involved in editing, I work out short-cut keystrokes for this, but if I step away from a project for a day or two, I can't remember them, and have to go hunting for notes I may or may not have made.
Using Edit>Trim... on a project clip is awkward if it is short and the underlying event clip is long. Instead of providing finer control on positioning endpoints, it is coarser. (I encountered this with digitized Hi-8 (analog) video; event clips were up to one hour long.) I eventually figured out that one can lengthen the clip in the trim window, and then go back to the project for fine-tuning.
If the project has a number of out-of-sequence topics, it is tedious to move clips from one place to another. In a movie about a visit to Europe I was collecting little snippets of video that showed American influence (e.g. a McDonald's or an Arby's). In the earlier iMovie, I would collect these on the shelf and then move them as a group to their place in the movie. There doesn't seem to be the anything similar in iMovie08.
Working with long clips, I did a lot of Split Clip menu commands; a shortcut key is needed!
Got lots of spinning beachballs while splitting project clips on a 45min project.
Got lots of spinning beachballs (10-20 sec pauses) while adding titles and transitions to a (now) 30 min project.
I miss being able to easily mute out sounds in the middle of a clip.
I miss being able to use fast/slow motion effects.
Sending a project to iDVD is not intuitive. There's a whole new level interposed between editing and DVD.
The idea of adding chapter breaks to a movie by going to GarageBand is really counterintuitive!
One can once again remove unwanted portions of clips permanently from the disk. (This feature disappeared when iMovie HD was released, so I currently use iMovie 4 when disk space is tight.) Unfortunately, DV clips are reformatted during the process, so the "trimmed" clip can be larger than the untrimmed one!
Not all functionality is available from the menubar. Some can only be found by querying the Help documentation and using the mouse/keystrokes therein.

Appendix: Home-grown Utilities

The Finder window below shows the contents of a classic iMovie project (named F84test, in this example). In iMovie 4 the top level of a project is an ordinary folder. With iMovie HD, the folder became a package (which hides the contents from the casual user), but the actual contents are similar for both iMovies. The details of the project are contained in a text file, which is also named F84Etest. (The format of the project file changed for iMovie HD, but either format can be read with a simple text editor.) The video are inside of the Media subfolder as a sequence of DV-formatted files Clip 01, Clip 02, etc.

Files inside an iMovie 06 project

One can use the Finder to move clips from one project's Media folder to another's, but since all projects reuse the Clip 01, Clip 02... filenames, it's easy to get collisions. I wrote an Applescript to rename the clips with a prefix derived from the name of the project. I also added three digits to the filenames, so that projects that had more than 99 clips would still sort properly in the Finder display. The script also used QuickTime Pro to extract the capture dates from the clips and create a ClipInventory.txt file which could be read into a MySQL database. (This latter functionality is the only major thing from my utilities that is missing from iMovie 08.)

Files inside a Nerf'd iMovie 04 project

iMovie 08 does not split its video files into projects, but collects them in Events, which are automatically split out by capture date. The files are named after their capture times (or iMovie's best guess at the capture time) , so that name collisions do not occur.

The new project file format is not readable with a text editor.

Files inside an iMovie 08 event