Damn this is easy!
Written: Oct 19 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: very easy to use
Cons: needs more titles/transitions
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| gerstein's Full Review: iMovie 2 |
When I first got my laptop, I lamented the lack of iMovie on the hard drive. Granted, I didn't have access to a FireWire camera, so it didn't really matter, but I wanted to play.
Then I found out the company I work for has a FireWire based camera (a nice Sony). I also discovered a trick to use ANY QuickTime media in iMovie (you have to convert it to a .dv (digital video) movie) which would let me use my regular camcorder to do the video input. Very nice.
So, I grabbed iMovie 1 and started playing. Then Apple released iMovie 2.... I downloaded that and fell in love.
The interface for iMovie is simple. You have the bin, which is where movie clips that aren't being used go. There's the preview area - where you preview your movie. Then there are 3 timelines at the bottom of the screen: video and 2 audio. You can use this to move through the movie, add titles, add transitions, or add movie/sound clips to the movie.
How do you add a movie clip? Just drag it from the bin to the movie timeline. If there is audio for the movie, it's added along with the video track. Want to add another? Do the same thing. Click on the "Transitions" button and the bin is replaced by your transition options. Select the transition you want, make some changes to the length of time that it takes or the options for the effect, and then drag it between (or before or after) a clip and iMovie will build the transition into the movie. Click the play button to preview what the movie will look like. You also have the option of doing a full-screen preview - it looks damn fine on my PowerBook G3!
When you're done editing your movie, you have 2 options. If you've got a FireWire/Digital Video camcorder connected, you can export the movie back to tape. This is pretty straight-forward - choose Export... and tell it to export to video. iMovie takes care of the rest.
If you want to export to a QuickTime movie, you can export to a file. You can choose one of the defaults (email movie, small web movie, big web movie, CD-Rom movie) or you can customize the settings - so that you can get the quality you want, or make the file really small, or just tweak the heck out of it. Exporting to a file can take quite some time if it's a long movie, but the quality has been very good for me.
Titling and transition options are pretty good - there's a nice variety to start you off, and Apple offers an expansion pack that's free. I hope that Apple releases the source for the plugins to the public so that people can come up with their own - it'd be nice to have thousands to choose from, instead of just the 15-20 that come with the software.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
gerstein
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Member: Adam Gerstein
Location: Milford, CT
Reviews written: 110
Trusted by: 5 members
About Me:
Father of 4. Computer geek. Opinionated. What more can I say?
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