iMovie 09 moves back toward iMovie 08 (and Final Cut Pro)

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!