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The Digital Media Series Apple iMovie |
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Apple last week released iMovie to the general public. Previously iMovie was only distributed and functional with Apple's iMac DV computers.
With the new release, Power Mac G4 and PowerBook G3/FireWire users can
also utilize the consumer DV editing package. In addition to the Apple supported
computers, Insanely Great Mac has tested iMovie with other FireWire-equipped computers,
such as the PowerMac G4/Blue&White and PowerBook G3 with the Newer
Technology FireWire 2 Go PCMCIA card. For Mac users this is big news. As if buying a DV camera and cables to go with that new Mac wasn't expensive enough, you were still stuck in the mud to tie it all together. iMovie now allows anyone with a FireWire Mac to import, edit and export DV movies. Previously, we were pretty limited to expensive commercial editing packages.
What you will need
To get going with iMovie, you basically need a FireWire-equipped Mac and a DV camera. For hardware, Apple requires an iMac DV, Power Mac G4 and PowerBook G3 with Mac OS 9.0.4, QuickTime 4.1, 64 MB of RAM, 2 GB of drive space, an 800 x 600 display and a 4-pin to 6-pin FireWire cable.
I found that you'd probably want to make sure you have the latest FireWire and QuickTime software. I tested with QuickTime 4.1.2 and FireWire 2.3.3 and everything worked great. Again, iMovie seems to work fine with other Macs, but Apple will only support these listed machines.
iMovie requests 26 MB of RAM, 16 MB
minimum. I found that after
moderate use the program runs into memory problems. I boosted my application to a
maximum of 40 MB of RAM and things seemed to go a little better. Also you'll want
to ensure that you have adequate hard drive space. To capture DV movies, you will
need about 222 MB for a minute of recorded video. Additionally, you'll need space
for the application to work and save any final movies. What it will do
This is really the first chance I had to sit down with iMovie. I've used Premiere, EditDV and Final Cut Pro numerous times. I've also used a shareware DV capture application called BTV. iMovie is really great for quickly grabbing video, cutting and pasting it together and exporting it to file or camera. You can selectively edit video clips, add transitions, titles, sound effects and sound tracks. You have a choice to export your project to a QuickTime movie or back to a DV source. For the QuickTime export, iMovie offers presets or custom settings for Web, email, or CD-ROM.
I was pretty impressed with iMovie's title feature. You can add fade titles, like in the beginning of a feature film, scrolling titles, like the end of films and also some other cools stuff like typewriter titles in the corner like The X-Files. Titles can be controlled for speed direction and duration, but not size or position. The titles can be on a black tile or placed over a video clip. For sound, users can import audio, music or record live voice-overs with the sound utility. iMovie installs numerous built in sound effects like glass breaking or clapping. Finally, iMovie comes with numerous transitions to add dramatic scene changes. For transitions, there's everything from the simple dissolve to picture zooms and slides.
Another pleasant feature is that iMovie supports DV device control. This allows
you to control your DV camera from the application. I also liked the live rendering
for special effects. iMovie will start rendering transitions and titles after you
place them, and allow you to keep working. This is nice since most other editors
needs lengthy rendering time to actually see the final result. Here it's done on
the fly in the background.
What it can't do
As neat as iMovie is, it shouldn't be confused for a professional editor. It lacks
a lot of features that's considered to be bread and 
butter to most video editors. It's pretty obvious
that iMovie is intended to make video editing as simple as possible.
One thing that puzzled me was the lack of control with the title option. You can
go so far as change fonts, but there's no way to change the font size or alignment.
Additionally you can't move titles to specific areas of the screen. iMovie also only
supports a maximum of 12 unused media shelf bins. This isn't that big of a deal since
as soon as you move a clip to the time line, it frees up a shelf slot.
For actual clip editing iMovie falls behind. Editing video clips can be a little
awkward, but not too bad once you get the hang of it. iMovie includes a splice feature,
which helps to quickly cut out unneeded video. I was also really disappointed by
the lack of sound editing. Basically you can only trim the end of sound tracks. You
can, however, control the soundtrack sound levels, which is nice, but you can only
set the level volume for the entire clip. If you wanted to raise or lower volume
levels within tracks for emphasis, you're out of luck.
Desktop video is not for the desktop
DV is best used for exporting back to a camcorder or TV. QuickTime files from a DV
source tend to be grainy and at times quite pixilated. If you shrink the movie's
dimensions down to 320x240, things start to look a little better. People are usually
pretty surprised when they see the quality of DV on a computer, but when it is exported
back to a camera or TV, everything looks great. There's nothing wrong — this is just
the way it is.
What you will want to do
My advice is not to make iMovie something that it's not. iMovie is ideal for taking
short video clips, and putting them together to tell a story with music, sound effects,
transitions and then export it out to video device or file. iMovie is simple and
fast for both the good and bad. You're not going to make a Hollywood feature with
iMovie, but you can make some pretty cool home movies from the holidays.
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