[English] Making movies

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

'Apple Recasts iMovie With Improved Features' DAVID POGUE www.nytimes.com 

I've always been an iMovie nut. This humble video-editing program from 
Apple, in its way, launched my entire career of making weekly goofball 
tech videos. For three years, I made them all by myself, on the cheap, 
with a camcorder and iMovie. Then, in 2007, CNBC offered to film and edit 
them for me. And put the results on TV. And pay me. I know - life's tough.


No wonder, then, that I was so aghast when Apple replaced my beloved 
iMovie with something called iMovie '08. As I wrote in my review: "It's 
nothing like its predecessor and contains none of the same code or 
design. It's incapable of the more sophisticated editing that the old 
iMovie made so enjoyable.

"You can't manually adjust audio levels during a scene (for example, to 
make the music quieter when someone is speaking). You can't extract the 
audio from a clip. All the old audio effects are gone, too. No pitch 
changing, high-pass and low-pass filters, or reverb.

"The new iMovie doesn't accept plug-ins, either. You can't add chapter 
markers for use in iDVD, which is supposed to be integrated with iMovie. 
Bookmarks are gone. 'Themes' are gone. All visual effects are gone--even 
basic options like slow motion, reverse motion, fast motion, and black-
and-white. Incredibly, the new iMovie can't even convert older iMovie 
projects. All you can import is the clips themselves. None of your 
transitions, titles, credits, music, or special effects are preserved."

And so on.

Apple has spent the last year licking its wounds and propping up this 
iMovie impostor. The new version, iMovie '09, is far more usable.

If you're scoring at home, here are the features that have been restored: 
themes, extracting audio, chapter markers, direct export to iDVD, visual 
effects (including slo-mo, reverse motion, black-and-white and more).

Here's what's still missing: plug-ins, audio effects, manual audio 
adjustments, bookmarks, importing old iMovie projects without losing all 
your enhancements.

That tally isn't exactly fair, however, because it doesn't consider all 
the things the new iMovie does that the old one couldn't. For example, 
its various skimming and scene-grabbing tools make it very quick to 
excerpt the best parts of your raw footage, and you never wait for 
anything to "render" in iMovie '09; any effect, transition, color 
adjustment or title you apply takes effect instantly.

A new pop-up menu appears when you drag one clip onto another one, 
offering options like Cutaway, Insert, Audio Only, Picture in Picture and 
Green Screen--by far the simplest presentation of these advanced features 
you'll see in a video editor. There are a handful of nice-looking, 
canned "themes" that let you open and close your movie with pro-looking 
graphics, and an excellent map feature that draws an animated line to 
show the course of your travels (à la Indiana Jones).

There's a wicked-cool feature that lets you tap along to music--every 
beat, or at any spastic intervals you want--and then drop video clips 
onto those markers, so that the video cuts happen right in time to the 
music (or to your taps). Fast and easy.

The killer app, though, is image stabilization. It takes a long time to 
apply to a clip--several minutes each--but it winds up making jerky 
footage smooth, even if you were filming while hiccuping on a camel ride 
during an earthquake. You control the degree of smoothness; that's lucky, 
since 100 percent steady looks almost freakishly unnatural.

This feature works fantastically well--so much, in fact, that it's ruined 
everyone else's videos for me. Now, every time I see a handheld camera 
shot--on YouTube, on the news, in a documentary, I struggle to suppress 
the instinct to mentally apply iMovie stabilization to it. I just can't 
overstate what a revelation this feature is--and how much more watchable 
your home movies become.

The new iMovie offers so many satisfying time-savers that I would embrace 
it wholeheartedly, if it weren't still missing one critical option.

See, the world is moving to hi-def camcorders. And iMovie '09 works great 
with hi-def camcorders. But what if you want to show your edited movie on 
a high-definition TV?

You can't!

You can upload it to YouTube (at diminished quality), export it to a DVD 
(at diminished quality), or send it to your Apple TV, iPhone or iPod (at 
diminished quality).

In the days of olde iMovie, you could export the results back to your 
tape camcorder. You'd preserve 100 percent quality, you'd free up the 
space on your hard drive, ready for the next editing project, and you'd 
have a simple way to play the movies on your HDTV.

Apple, however, is convinced that tape camcorders are dead, and it seems 
determined to pound nails into that coffin. The company expects you to 
store all of your video, now and forever, on hard drives. (The 100 MiniDV 
tapes currently in my cabinet, for example, would require about 1.5 
terabytes of hard drive space--double that if I want a backup.)

No Macs have Blu-ray burners, and iMovie lacks an Export to Tape command, 
so your high-def masterpieces are pretty much trapped forever on your 
Mac. (Sure, you could post them online, but only if they're short, and 
only if everyone in your potential audience has very high-speed Internet.)

Otherwise, if you've been terrified by the quivering disaster that was 
iMovie '08, you can come out hiding now; it won't bite. It requires a lot 
of relearning, but there's a lot of joy along the way. Especially for the 
hard-drive industry.

Visit David Pogue on the Web at www.DavidPogue.com
--

Cheers,
Stephen .. btw .. one video of a smoke-stained and fire-burnt victim, whom
had just lost their home .. crying on the Prime Minister's shoulder .. and
then our Prime Minister putting an arm around him .. and crying also ..

 .. is a video image that will remain with me for the rest of my life ..



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