A Goodbye To Brianna

I haven’t posted here in a long while…. Sorry, been busy with work, life, sickness, and the Holidays. I’ll get back to it though. One little project that was a bunch of fun though was this:

Brianna in Maine from glynor on Vimeo.

I wanted to learn a little about iMovie anyway, and this seemed like a good opportunity. I won’t actually use iMovie all that often, but it is good to know about it for when friends and family ask how to edit their home movies. Saying “you should buy Final Cut Pro and spend years learning it” wouldn’t be an acceptable answer, I suspect.

Actually using iMovie was interesting. There are some things about it I really like, especially the ease with which you can put together photo slideshows. In fact, if I have any “remembrance” or “event” slideshow movies to put together quickly for work in the future, I’m absolutely going to pull out iMovie to do it (or at least those sections of the final project). I wish that Apple had a similar “auto-slideshow” function built into Motion, but one that gives you a bit more control actually. Also, the audio ducking support in iMovie 11 was easy to use and worked well, especially for layering crappily recorded interviews over top of music.

Pretty much everything else about it felt clunky though, compared to a “real” NLE. Of course, I’m used to the concept of video layers and being able to easily do split edits and things like that. Precision trimming was challenging, and even though I’m using it on a 8-core Nehalem Mac Pro beast, there were times when it felt laggy and slow (especially moving the text overlays and things like that).

All in all, I’d say iMovie is a wonderful home movie video editor. It is limited in scope, but very well targeted at what the regular home user would want to do with their projects. I like how it hides the complexity of file storage from the user, and many of the text “template” and transition tools are fun and simple. The one thing I can imagine novice users wanting to do that was a bit challenging to figure out is split edits (especially placing a photo overtop of a video track to illustrate the speaker’s point). I could have possibly been “doing it wrong” (thinking too much like a NLE editor), but it certainly wasn’t very intuitive. Otherwise though, it was a fun learning experience.