I just put the new iMovie 8 on my old iMac and was curiously waiting to work with it, after all that hype Jobs made when he presented it to the world. What a coincidence that i had to edit a short 3:28min trailer for a local non-profit organisation.
It was only silent footage (calm beachlevel shots, high surf and rips, helicopter coast shots and dunes that got washed away by heavy sea), but the trailer needed some mix of hip (?) techno beats and some relaxing spheres and harmonies to get the guests attention at the beginning of the first hearing at our congress center.
Well, iMovie 8 looks cool! Ways cooler than iMovie 6, but here’s the killer: It is frickin’ impossible to edit the audio tracks in iMovie 08!
In fact, there are no audio tracks anymore! There were 3 stereo tracks in v6; one for the original footage audio and two additional tracks for music, effects or voice-over. Limited but good enough for simple projects. You can still cut the audio though, but you can only cut — it’s impossible to fade in or out, or lower the volume for certain scenes. I couln’t believe it — i googled for “audio editing iMovie 8″ and found zero.
One plus has the new version: The new skimming feature is great! If you hover and move your mouse along a short scene (see the orange bar in the screenshot), it shows the actual frame instead of a static thumbnail — just like fastforward or fastrewind — but in real time! Makes it a piece of cake to find the right scene to cut. Also the new event sorting is great for beginners (not really needed by me, but iMovie is not a pro application, it is ment for beginners).
Apples mistake is that they just forgot the possibility that they could just add the new revolutionary features into the old version. That would have been stunning: So dear Steve Jobs, just merge the two programs and boom!
