iMovie '09: Thank you
iMovie doesn't seem to be getting much love in the iLife '09 thread, so I'd thought I'd single it out for props.
I was one of the people who thought the redesigned iMovie '08 was a train wreck of of a step backwards from the previous version. Apple dumbed the thing down to the point that it allowed very little granular control of anything and seemed to be intended mainly for super crude, super fast "editing" of content bound for You Tube. Slap the techno beat du jour over it and you're done.
Now some people thought this was excellent. Such people claimed, mystifyingly, I thought, that the previous version of iMovie was "too hard to learn", or something, and welcomed this further descent into brain damaged baby world, wherein "making stuff" must be effortless, since nobody wants to look at anything for more than a few seconds anyway. On account of the brain damage. "If you need to get all fancy with this so-called 'video editing' you speak of", they said, "you should just use Final Cut, which is what we hear the tedious people who waste time worrying about 'quality' use." Such people, it should be noted, were not only wrong but evil and stupid and quite possibly deserved to be murdered.
But! Bygones! iMovie '08 is no more! All hail '09, and the return of, you know, being able to do stuff. Not only that, but you don't have to do stuff if you don't want to! You can continue to churn out horrifying videos of your friends doing stupid stuff with your terrible music bolted to it like a fiberglass spoiler on a '93 Maxima, no prob! Knock yourself out!
Meanwhile, Apple has implemented what appears to be some really slick UI tricks to put precision control on top of the graphical timeline concept introduced with '08. Can't say for sure until I play with it, but this actually looks like an advance over the old style. Even in my sorrow and rage, I could see that the live scrubbing and auto-population of the media bin were good things, now the scrubbing extends to effects and transition previews. Effects and transitions that are far more numerous, with the familiar inspector window on hand to fine tune things.
And access to the system font pane for titles.
And picture in picture, with a fair amount of control. Easily accessible from a drag and drop invoked pop-up, which includes various other flavors of clip interaction.
And, holy crap, image stabilization. Can't tell from the QT video how bad a hit image quality takes, but, you know, cool. Get that tracking shot look without a dolly.
I believe I remember saying that I wasn't dead set against the general idea of what Apple had done with '08, just that it didn't make any sense that they had taken out so much functionality. It seemed like they could have made the "fancy" stuff a menu or pref toggle, if they really thought their average user was so intimidated by choices, so that everybody could be happy. The fact that they didn't suggest to me that Apple had gone insane and probably intended to kill us all.
However, I'm pleased to revise that opinion and concede that perhaps a ground-up rewrite of iMovie meant folding in features as they got to them.
Fold they have, and I no longer have a beef with this particular corner of Apple perversity. That is all.
I was one of the people who thought the redesigned iMovie '08 was a train wreck of of a step backwards from the previous version. Apple dumbed the thing down to the point that it allowed very little granular control of anything and seemed to be intended mainly for super crude, super fast "editing" of content bound for You Tube. Slap the techno beat du jour over it and you're done.
Now some people thought this was excellent. Such people claimed, mystifyingly, I thought, that the previous version of iMovie was "too hard to learn", or something, and welcomed this further descent into brain damaged baby world, wherein "making stuff" must be effortless, since nobody wants to look at anything for more than a few seconds anyway. On account of the brain damage. "If you need to get all fancy with this so-called 'video editing' you speak of", they said, "you should just use Final Cut, which is what we hear the tedious people who waste time worrying about 'quality' use." Such people, it should be noted, were not only wrong but evil and stupid and quite possibly deserved to be murdered.
But! Bygones! iMovie '08 is no more! All hail '09, and the return of, you know, being able to do stuff. Not only that, but you don't have to do stuff if you don't want to! You can continue to churn out horrifying videos of your friends doing stupid stuff with your terrible music bolted to it like a fiberglass spoiler on a '93 Maxima, no prob! Knock yourself out!
Meanwhile, Apple has implemented what appears to be some really slick UI tricks to put precision control on top of the graphical timeline concept introduced with '08. Can't say for sure until I play with it, but this actually looks like an advance over the old style. Even in my sorrow and rage, I could see that the live scrubbing and auto-population of the media bin were good things, now the scrubbing extends to effects and transition previews. Effects and transitions that are far more numerous, with the familiar inspector window on hand to fine tune things.
And access to the system font pane for titles.
And picture in picture, with a fair amount of control. Easily accessible from a drag and drop invoked pop-up, which includes various other flavors of clip interaction.
And, holy crap, image stabilization. Can't tell from the QT video how bad a hit image quality takes, but, you know, cool. Get that tracking shot look without a dolly.
I believe I remember saying that I wasn't dead set against the general idea of what Apple had done with '08, just that it didn't make any sense that they had taken out so much functionality. It seemed like they could have made the "fancy" stuff a menu or pref toggle, if they really thought their average user was so intimidated by choices, so that everybody could be happy. The fact that they didn't suggest to me that Apple had gone insane and probably intended to kill us all.
However, I'm pleased to revise that opinion and concede that perhaps a ground-up rewrite of iMovie meant folding in features as they got to them.
Fold they have, and I no longer have a beef with this particular corner of Apple perversity. That is all.
Comments
iMovie 06 was just built on a creaky codebase. I think Apple will expose plug-in support before the next version. I think it's almost ready to open up to 3rd party for plug-ins. Just like Aperture shipped a 2.0 version and then promptly upgraded the plug-in support for version 2.1 I think iMovie 09 will open up as well.
It looks to me like Apple has really hit on something here, UI wise-- really rethought the work flow of basic video editing to make it fast and intuitive, and now that they've managed to work in some reasonably fine grained control, I could really see using iMovie for a lot of simple projects.
I should say, I could see once again using iMovie for a lot of simple projects-- but all of a sudden the old iMovie looks dated and excessively linear, just like people where assuring me it did when '08 came out, 'cept I couldn't see for the hate.
It seems like Apple's trying to move away from these dense timelines and into something
that's a bit more fluid but i'm looking at iMovie and trying to see how they're going to take
some of the features "Pro" without upsetting the old guard.
I think iMovie 09 is pretty tantalizing though. I'm sure there is going to be some rough spots but it really looks like we're going to be able to rapidly whip up simple vids.
I hope they open it up to plug-ins soon so that we can get more text tools and maybe someone hacking in some motion graphics or particles on the cheap.
I'm REALLY curious as to where Apple's going to take their higher end offerings.
Speaking of high end Autodesk surprisingly committed to the Mac platform with some new apps hitting.
Toxik, ImageModeler, Mudbox, Stitcher join Maya
That's pretty damn good news.
I tried to imagine using this iMovie on a tablet, and, guess what? Totally works. In fact, I would think there would be something of the feel of editing film on a bench, moving and dragging and cutting clips with your fingers, with the skimming thing replacing holding up a length of film to a backlight. The size of the precision edit window would make tracing out cut points a snap, you just tap clips to get windows with adjustment sliders, toggle the good sized icons for sound, fx and titles, drag, drop, tap again, skim some options, watch it play.
I'm starting to wonder if Apple isn't planning on making iLife the big differentiator for a touch tablet-- these apps are the least "keyboard-y" around, and the latest revision seem to really be pushing finger friendly UIs.
Could Apple be optimizing apps for multi-touch in plain sight? I have to say, it really looks to me like they are.
One of the reasons I've always been so anti-tablet is because a tablet is useless unless you are a server in a large restaurant or you wear a uniform. I never understood WHEN WILL APPLE MAKE A TABLET
Admittedly I also imagine I open doors and do the cooking with the aid of a large, invisible cursor sometimes, but hey and ho.
I'd actually like a thin glass and metal slab I could put in my Boblbee backpack and read books on and do my arty shit on.
I've been thinking something like this.
One of the reasons I've always been so anti-tablet is because a tablet is useless unless you are a server in a large restaurant or you wear a uniform. I never understood WHEN WILL APPLE MAKE A TABLET
Admittedly I also imagine I open doors and do the cooking with the aid of a large, invisible cursor sometimes, but hey and ho.
I'd actually like a thin glass and metal slab I could put in my Boblbee backpack and read books on and do my arty shit on.
Yeah, me too. Tablets seem like groovy tech in search of an actual market.
But direct image manipulation, hmmmm.......
Reading's good, as well. And web surfing. Well, pretty much anything besides entering much text or numbers, so office type work is out, all to the better.
I saw somewhere that '09 is multi-touch aware, presumably via the new notebook trackpads. I wonder what that entails?