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VFX/MoGraph/Editorial : Life
iMovie…the new rough cut.
August 8th, 2007 | Filed under Apple, Blog, Film, Ideas, Work
I’ve gotta give Apple’s iLife team some credit when it comes iMovie ’08. Now I pay the bills as a video editor and compositor using a ton of Apple tools and I’m very comfortable with the traditional 3-point non-linear editing as defined by Avid and refined by Final Cut. However, the average consumer is not….and Apple kept assuming that the way to improve iMovie was to add more “professional” features to the program. While that always made me a little happier when sitting down to help someone with their home iMovie, it meant that with every release of iLife, iMovie became more and more complicated.
Enter iMovie ’08. This new release looks to be an entirely different way of working with home movies and it should make life easier for the causal/home video editor. There are some tools, namely Final Cut Server, on the pro side of things that are similar to the new iMovie workflow, but nothing in the true consumer market. Gone is the standard timeline with tracks of video and audio, and now there is a project workspace where you just piece your movie together.
The new release is really exciting but I noticed a menu item in the new iMovie that could really change the game in rough cuts. Check out the photo above. There is now an option to export your project to FCP with the “Export Final Cut XML” command. What this does is allow you to export your project into a format that Final Cut can understand and have your movie instantly setup and ready for further refinement in FCP.
I’m dying to give this to some of the producers at my office as Final Cut tends to be way to bloated for the simple rough cuts they are preparing. Also, with iMovie ’08 there is nothing to stop schools from teaching simple editing with iMovie and then taking that project into FCP to teach the kids the essential finishing and audio editing techniques.
I usually yawn at every new version of iMovie as it means more work for me when I sit down to help users at the LAUG meetings, but with this version I’m actually excited to show people a new way of thinking about their home movies. Again, where’s that (office) credit card!?
August 8th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Sorry, but the removal of the timeline in iMovie ’08 makes it a complete nonstarter for me. The ability to fine-tune and manipulate two tracks of audio seems to be gone–you can only make global adjustments. This makes it useless for me, where I add background music and need to match recorded voiceover (specifically, bride and groom wedding vows) to the main track. Apple has taken away the ability to fine-tune the audio, and instead gave us this ridiculous dumbed-down blunt tool. Sad. Very sad.
August 9th, 2007 at 7:15 am
Rich,
Thanks for your comment. I don’t know for certain if they’ve taken out the timeline or not. From all the videos and pics I’ve seen there does not appear to be one.
However, it sounds like you are doing more professional sounding work than iMovie was designed for.
You might consider upgrading to Final Cut Express. It is only $299 and it will give you a plethora of new tools, both audio and video to further polish your videos. Also, FCE is very similar to FCP and would give you a great way to broaden your software experiences should you choose to do so.