iMovie ‘08 Makes David Pogue Angry
- August 17th, 2007
- 6 Comments
Whoopsies. Looks like Apple’s brassed off the New York Times’ David Pogue. It seems that the iMovie program included in the new iLife suite is far less impressive than its predecessor, iMovie 6.
There’s no editing timeline, you’re only allowed use of a single audio track for background music, you’re unable to adjust the audio levels should you need to lower the music while someone’s talking, the audio clips fade out automatically with no ability to control or disable said feature, there’s no plug-in support any more, visual effects are absent, and you can’t convert old iMovie projects for use with the new software — to name just a few of Pogue’s quibbles.
“I can’t remember any software company pulling a stunt like this before: throwing away a fully developed, mature, popular program and substituting a bare-bones, differently focused program under the same name.
I’ve used the real iMovie to edit my Times videos for three years now. The results are perfectly convincing as professional video blog work. But the new version is totally unusable for that purpose. It’s unusable, in fact, for anyone doing professional work that requires any degree of precision.”
There are some new useful features, however, such as one-click YouTube uploading, great color correction and frame cropping, and on-the-fly title and crossfade previews. You’re also allowed to download iMovie 6 for free if you own iMovie ‘08 and Pogue thinks that Apple will eventually update the new program to include some of the older features.
Apple Takes a Step Back With iMovie ’08 [New York Times]
Jeff Saunders (Who am I?)
1 year ago
hehe thats 2 bad Apple reviews in as many days, first the lame iWork… Apple is starting to look like crapple…
dwalk51 (Who am I?)
1 year ago
well, I didn’t know that all those things were missing =/
but since they are missing it does sound like iMovie sucks
gotmac (Who am I?)
1 year ago
You know, my feeling on the subject is that iMovie is and never was (even iMovie 6) designed for professional level production or even podcasting for that matter. It was created to give the average Joe the ability to share their personal videos with friends and family, period. Apple has delivered on that. That’s why it’s part of iLife.
David Pogue of all people should know that and if he doesn’t have it should go out and get a copy of FinalCut Express if he wants professional features. iMovie is just not intended for that. Quit whining.
shelbinator (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Drive your own waaambulance, gotmac; plenty of us have been producing perfectly acceptable serial-podcast-quality stuff with iMovie all along, and that was enabled in large part by the now-absent feature set. iMovie ‘08 sounds like the worst idea ever.
Susanna Denes (Who am I?)
7 months ago
I used iMovie HD, and now iMovie 08. First I was very upset, but after figuring the program out, I was able to create about the same quality movie, as before. I think people, who did not use iMovie HD before loves the program. It is easy to use and user friendly. It does have some bugs, here and there, and I hope Apple will fix those very soon.
It is very simple to add clips to the project. It IS possible to adjust the background music, even though you have to go clip by clip to do it. You can add many music to the project. One background music, and many audio tracks, that attached to a particular clip, and not to the background. Personally I feel that it is easier to use the tracks, than the background music. I could not figure out the difference yet.
You cannot control the volume of the background music or tracks separately though. You can make all added audio together softer or lauder, or you can make the audio that attached to the clip lauder, softer or mute. I would suggest to edit the audio in the Garage Band program, by exporting the movie to the media browser, and open it in garage band. There you can create more professional sound effects.
Also, people complain about not being able to split the clip. You don’t need to. You can move only part of the clip to your project. If you want to split that selection, you can select a tiny frame of it, and by deleting that section (simply hit “delete”)the program will split the clip at that point into two.
Marjan
4 months ago
Why nearly same quality? I WANT better. It is downgrading of a bad UI and good compressor into good UI and fucked-up compressor. Imovie 08 simply WON’T LET YOU create HD movies, although you DO HAVE HD clips. imovie6 allowed that, but editing sucks.
This is first big black mark on apple software. imovie6/8 suck and it suck long way! I thought this is the thing but it ain’t. Back to windows I guess…
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