Today was the keynote from MacWorld. Since Steve Jobs wasn’t presenting the Steve-note it was Phil Schiller, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing. I saw someone on Twitter call it a Phil-in … thought that was funny. Coverage has been all over the web so most people know by now there where announcements about a DRM-free iTunes (though you will pay a “tax” to upgrade your existing DRMed songs), a new 17-inch MacBook Pro and new iWork and iLife suites. The whole Phil-in can be viewed via QuickTime from Apple’s site so you can see all the details.
One update worth noting around here was in the iLife suite: iMovie 09.
I have mentioned in the past how I was impressed by iMovie 08. I like the idea that someone really was thinking different about video editing. Others didn’t like the change all that much. iMovie 09 is an upgrade to this new interface and doesn’t take it back to its pre-08 days but it does add a few features that make it more like a video editor has to be to be an actual video editor. There’s an iMovie 09 guided tour now available that takes you through the new version.
One thing that has been added is a little pop-up menu when dragging a clip into the iMovie 09 psuedo-timeline that is very similar to the Final Cut Pro overlay menu when you drag a clip into the Canvas window:
That was totally expected since you can’t really have a video editor in which you can’t insert a clip into an edit. They call this “advanced drag and drop editing.” Another cool thing is you often get a pop-up box that shows different styles for things like titles and animation, backgrounds and effects on clips. Drag over the little thumbnails in the pop-up and you get a preview in your monitor as well as tiny thumbnails of your selected frame and what the effects looks like on that frame:
That’s very Magic Bullet Looks.
Video stabalization has come along as well. Like Final Cut Pro’s SmoothCam you must analyize the raw footage first and then the clips are stable when you place them in an edit:
Let’s hope it doesn’t take as long to analyze in iMovie 09 as it does in FCP. It’ll be interesting to see the difference between the two as well as how good it works.
There’s a lot of other eye candy like new Themes and media browsing via Cover Flow in a full screen browser and Travel Maps ala Raiders of the Lost Ark. But the funniest thing I noticed was the addition of the new Precision Editor:
It looks to me more like a trim tool / trim mode / trim edit window than iMovie’s old Clip Trimmer:
Why do I say funny? Because with the addition of iMovie 09’s very own Trim Edit there will soon be more people using a dedicated trim mode in iMovie than in Final Cut Pro!
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The new 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pro’s only have 1 firewire port, how do they expect you to import footage to an external hard drive, especially if it’s a firewire 400 drive?
Not crazy about the mini DVI port, you have to spent $40 on adapters to go to a monitor or screen, and it pops out too easy! Not good when your Keynote or Powerpoint is being viewed by 6000 people.
The biggest thing that has been “new and improved” is the re-instatement of exporting to iDVD. After giving it a fair chance, I grew to love iMovie ’08’s way of editing over iMovie HD. But I was pissed off that Apple didn’t give you any way to easily export your finished edit to iDVD. They were too enamored with Youtube and making you buy a me.com account to export your finished edits to the web. After years of telling us that “you can’t get this kind of integration between programs on Windows at any price”, they had nixed it from iMovie ‘08. According to the features list, iDVD integration is back in iMovie ‘09.
According to David Pogue you still can’t export (share) your finished project back to your camcorder. That’s a bummer for us HDV shooters since that seems like the best way to archive our projects and view them in HD on our HDTVs. They don’t look nearly as good on a HDTV when reduced to 480i via iDVD. I guess I’ll save my $79 and continue using iMovie HD which does allow me to export to camcorder.
Although I like the SmoothCam function on FCP, there aren’t any controls once the footage has been analyzed. I needed to stabilize a shot with a skateboarder moving across the screen, which FCP worked with fine, until the final second when the whole screen tracked with the skateboarder. Unfortunately there was no way to undo this, so I had to leave the shot a little unstable.
Brandon, Once you apply and analyze via SmoothCam in FCP there are control to tweak in the filter settings in the viewer. Though the defaults usually seem best you can give this a try.
Wondering if anyone has tried out the ‘green screen’ effects in imovie ‘09 yet. Need to know if its any good as this will determine whether I upgrade to ilife’09. I was originally planning to buy FCE4 and staying with ilife’06 on my mac pro. Also worried that upgrading to ‘09 will mess up my web pages. I’ve read that it does.
Cheers, pj.
thanks for writing this great review. I’m trying to figure out whether or not I should upgrade since I’m just starting to feel comfortable with 08. Don’t want to get confused : )
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[...] and Avid editor Scott Simmons has written a few thoughts on iMovie ‘09 and it’s new features. It’s a good look at what’s new in the software [...]
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