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iMovie 08's biggest weakness is that it ditched iMovie 06.

All of Apple's current problems and user complaints could have easily been avoided if they kept and upgraded iMovie 06 and simply added iMovie 08 as a feature called "instant movie" or "YouMovie."

I also want to add that iMovie really is quick and easy, but I really dislike the notion that iApps need to be so rudimentary..

I like to believe that most Mac users are sophisticated enough to figure out a basic timeline application.

just brilliant wow such insight

when is your book coming out????

bla bla bla

MDN,

Quit flogging a dead horse.

David Pogue already did this.

Hey, just my opinion as an average video editing user.

Get off it, MacDailyNews. The new iMovie '08 is A HORRIBLE PROGRAM THAT DESTROYS EVERYTHING WE HAVE COME TO **DEPEND ON** IN IMOVIE '06, and no matter how many times you try to convince us otherwise, you're just making yourselves look foolish.

Come on MDN, just put a POLL up would you?

They forgot "Causes kernel panics in PPC Macs" under Weaknesses

Apple has really stuck their foot in it this time! They should shut down the company and give the money back to the shareholders! Freaking iMovie 08 is FREAKING RUINING MY WHOLE LIFE!

All you iMovie 06 fans should get it through your thick heads that Apple has made it's decision and it's final and your opinion hasn't had any effect on the stock price. It's over, finished, done, end of story. And, Apple is not suffering.

Now, you kids run along and go play with your iMovie 06.

iMovie '06 was very easy to use.

iMovie '08 is very quick to use. I've done much more video editing since upgrading to iMovie '08.

Runs fine here on my DP 2.0 G5.
Can someone explain what ducking means?
If I had to point out one weakness...really an annoyance..is the thumbnail creation after you've imported your video. After a 2 hour import you have to wait another 30 to 40 mins while iMovie creates the thumbnail needed, i guess, for skimming. perhaps this extra time is lessened with Inel processors.

Freddy the Pig's comment = Blind Lemming.

I haven't been keeping up with this so my apologies if this has been discussed to death but it seems to me that iMovie 06 was just powerful enough to steal some sales of FCExpress. I asked a few Apple Store guys why I should bother learning FCE (I'm not a pro nor will I ever be) and never got a compelling answer. The 1st thing out of their mouths was always 99 audio tracks. When I asked what I would do with #11-99 they never had an answer.

Now that they've dumbed-down (streamlined? right-sized? whatever) iMovie, they can nudge guys like me toward their $300 app. I bet we'll see FCE 4.0 in the next 6 months with some compelling you-can't-do-this-in-iMovie features.

Or not.

Hmmm...

Glossy only screens, insecurity and now feature rippping disguised as a paid upgrade.

Seems Apple is ignoring us customers lately...

"If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth–and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.” –Steve Jobs, 1996

http://d5.allthingsd.com/20070530/d5-gates-jobs-interview/

Frank - Ducking is when the background/foley/soundtrack is taken down in volume so you can hear the dialog. When the talking stops the rest returns to normal volume.

@ Frank: "Ducking" is what I do 24/7, but especially anytime Steve Jobs makes one of his announcements. Let me tell you, flying chairs do not feel good.

I, like everyone is here, am sure Apple will eventually add more features to the New iMovie. Maybe after we buy the next 2 or 3 versions, some of the features that were left out from 06 will be put back in!!

How cool is that?? Woooo Hoooo Steve!!!

339 reviews of iLife 08 at the apple store online, from .Mac subscribers. still only 2.5 stars out of 5.

It also appears that apple has started a "drop off" of reviews. Instead of reviews accumulating in numbers over time, they drop off after a few days. This appears to have the impact of rotating off the review all comments after a week or so. I'm guessing that eventually this will allow for the review stars to go up after they get the bugs worked out of iMovie and iDvd.

Whenever I see a foolish lemming defend iMovie '08 it makes me sad for Apple. We're supposed to be pushing Apple to new heights, not accepting it's pratfalls. When we start praising mediocrity, Apple will think that's what we want.

Let It GO!!!

MDN is killing themselves here. As a longtime Mac user, I can say honestly that this program iMovie08 SUCKS. Apple has been ignoring their base a bit lately. Let's leave the dumbing-down to other companies, say Micro-trash. Mac users are smart, and we expect more.

iMovie 08 just kicked my puppy! G*D D*MN YOU ST*VE J*BS!

Thanks for the freakin Hilarious posts.On par with Zune Tang.

Amen my son!

Do any of you folks realize that iMovie 6 hasn't gone away? If you need it, use it! For pro use, use FCP or FCE, for timeline type consumer use, use iMovie 6, and for fast professional looking, easy to use, easy to figure out quick movies that most consumers make, use iMovie '08. Apple has given all of you the best choices ever...take advantage of it. iMovie 6 costs zero with a iMovie '08 purchase. Abunch of dip-doo-doo's today.

What? No mention of the omission of chapter markers?

Jeff forgets that the base is growing by leaps and bounds and he may soon be the minority!

Dammit, ever since iMovie '08 came out, '06 just doesn't run anymore.

The program, I click on it and it does nothing. A little popup comes up saying the program is depressed and doesn't want to do anything.

I've tried coaxing it out of its icon and it just won't run.

I even tried running it on an iMac G4 that hasn't been plugged into the internet since before iLife '08 was released, and it won't run on that machine either. It says that even though the iMac isn't plugged into the internet it "heard" about iLife '08 from somebody, and is upset about the whole doesn't-run-on-G4s thing with '08 and iMac G4 is now on strike.

iMovie 8 needs an update yesterday. I've got a dual 1.8 GHz G5 tower. I tried to import 26 minutes of mpeg-4 video. iMovie 8 then told me it was going take 600 minutes to create the thumbnails. So after waiting 10 hours, I can then make my slick new 5 minute music video, and upload it to YouTube. Sweet!

I didn't realize how quickly my G5 tower would become obsolete. Thanks, Apple.

I'll take iMovie's organization, skimming, color correction, cropping, and the speed with which one can review footage and create movies for the few "lost" features from iMovie 06 any day.

The new features are powerful and practical. I've already imported old tape footage and created movies I never would have created with another editor. Without skimming, and the ease of selcting/editing clips that iMovie 08 provides, the prospect would have been too daunting.

It's a shame so many people (Mr. Pogue included) have forgotten that's what iMovie is for.

For those of you who never think anything should be reinvented, and just want your old program to continue to bloat and swell, there's always Microsoft's products...

@Tom

Bloating and swelling is one thing. Losing important and useful features like say, multi audio track control and video effects is another thing entirely.

I'm all for progress, but not if I have to take two steps back. Despite iMovie 08's good points, overall, it has taken more than two steps backwards.

"Skimming rocks. Period. This is not some sort of gimmick, it's the real deal. I can't imagine this not being useful sometimes even in a professional editor."


Skimming isn't new. It has been around forever in the land of Discreet. Combustion, Flint, Flame, and Inferno have it.

I'm glad it found its way into an Apple app and also hope it finds its way into other Apple apps.

@Tre,

Fair enough. I'm really not attempting to downplay what was lost, and iMovie 08 will no doubt get some added, but the ranting here and elsewhere bordered on hystria.

For audio, the movie can be brought into GarageBand for soundtrack editing if desired. For those of you yelling for more advanced features, this is just like its big brothers FCE and FCP, who also farm out soundtrack duties to another app.

For that matter, you can also bring a movie into GarageBand and add chapter markers for DVD creation.

I'd simply prefer to concentrate on what was gained (plenty, in my opinion), and ultimate results. The proof is in the pudding. For all the NYT videos Mr. Pogue can apparently no longer create, there will be dozens of people (like me) creating far more movies than we would with '06. And these movies will not somehow be "less" because of the lost features. In fact, with cropping and color correction I'd say they're better.

@XLM,

Thanks. My point was that skimming (as opposed to loading a clip and scrubbing it) is one of the two large paradigm shifts in iMovie 08 (the other being no timeline). It is so useful I think it ought to be in every editing application. I can't imagine even the pros wouldn't find it a useful tool on their workbench some times.

Why is fact that 08 does not have any themes not included in the weaknesses section?

Strangely enough, all these reviews, the good and the bad, make me want to just go buy it and see. I have hours of dv tapes left unimported, unedited, and unseen. I've used iMove probably once a year since it was developed, and never really cared much for it. Maybe I'm the target audience for iMove '08. =)

@Ryan,

Excellent question. Lack of themes could be added as a weakness, but I believe themes (and "Magic Movie") were serious hack attempts at making iMovie easier, nothing more.

Apple approached it wrong. Making video editing easier didn't mean yet another "wizard", it required a ground-up rethinking of how video is reviewed and edited.

@Brad Kelley,

If you cannot stand the thought of editing video at all, then I'm not going to say iMovie 08 will fit the bill. As easy as it is, it still requires some effort on your part. I will say that if you won't edit video in iMovie 08 then you won't edit it anywhere, and you'll need to ait a few years for the next paradigm shift.

Seriously, before iMovie 08 I would load new footage, make a movie based on the primary subject for which I filmed, then ditch the remaining footage and store the tape. However, the tape was never reloaded or "rediscovered" because the process is just to cumbersome.

IMovie has changed all that for me. I have already loaded tapes from 2001 and culled through the footage for small gems that, frankly, I'd have never pulled off if not for the ease of this software to do so.

MDN/SteveJack must be getting some real good lovin' from Jobs to keep this up. Yet, still, we see the same ratio of pro/con comments here. Again

I said this in another post, but I think it bears repeating (at least in the hopes that it gets through some thicker heads):

The flaw in Apple's & MDN/SteveJacks's rational, as to why this iMovie hullabaloo will eventually blow over, once the wonderfulness of iMovie 08 is really appreciated, is that it fails to recognize the argument against iMovie 08 for what it is. NO ONE is dissing the new way of dealing with the videos (except for the lack of a timeline, or even the option of one - that's a dealbreaker). EVERYONE appreciates how much faster iMovie 08 is now.

The problem is the hacking off of almost all the useful features, especially multi audio track control and video effects.

The problem is not being able to utilize your plug-ins - both free and paid for - anymore.

The problem is not being able to import old iMovie projects very well, if at all.

The problem is with kernel panics & inconsistent performance on the huge installed base of adequately spec'ed PPC Macs

The problem is that IF all of these issues are ever remedied, it looks like Apple's pre-existing customers will have to pay for ANOTHER new version (iMovie 09 or 10), when they paid for them all once already.

The problem is having to use TWO pieces of software now, when before you only had to use ONE, to simply work with your video.

The last one illustrates how, no matter how simple to use 08 is, you lose most - maybe all - of that efficiency advantage by having to figure out which version you can get away with using for any given project. And if you guess wrong, then (because of the non-importing from 06 issue) all your work may wind up needing to be redone, depending on the circumstances.

Yet, all of the above could have been avoided. All Apple had to do was just not jump the gun, and give 08 time to be debugged, especially for PPC Macs (and btw - I consider not being able to import projects or use pre-existing plugins from previous software with the same name to be bugs too), and bring it up to the same feature level as the previous version of the software. Then they simply could have introduced it, say, in time for the Christmas buying season ... or (as the name already implies) in the first quarter of 2008 ... and literally EVERYBODY WOULD HAVE BEEN HAPPY!

Fair. Logical. Efficient. Profitable. In other words, the kind of solution I'm beginning to think must have been outlawed in this country some time ago when I wasn't looking.

Apple wasn't wrong to change iMovie. They were wrong in how they did it. And you - SteveJack/MDN are wrong for not lending your voice to those of us - longtime Apple supporters all - who are simply trying to get them to correct the error.

Until both MDN & Apple get a clue on this, this overall negativity is not going away, no matter how many favorable articles are written & posted on the issue. The people have spoken - iMovie 08 is NOT good enough, and it is not yet a worthy successor to iMovie 06.

So MDN/SteveJack, if your not going to help row that boat, go jump in the lake. 'Kay?

Apple shouldn't have brought iMovie back to its original purpose (easy editing for the masees, if you will) without having it also subsume all of iMovie 06? That's ridiculous.

In my opinion the new iMovie necessitated jetisoning some 06 baggage in order to fulfill its purpose. It also needed tools 06 didn't even have. To dream of some sort of all-encompassing iMovie that could have combined 06 and 08 is unrealistic at best. This "iMovie 14" would have pleased no one. The new features would have been deemed too simple by those complaining about 08 today, making for a useless upgrade to them, while the easy features would have been overshadowed by the fact that the old stuff was all still there to get past, limiting the usefulness of its new paradigm.

What Apple did in return is make 06 available so that users have time to determine what to do next:

- "Make do" (if that's what they want to call it) with 08.
- Upgrade to FCE or FCP.
- Abandon an Apple solution altogether and get, say, Adobe Premiere.
- Never edit another movie again.

Since 06 is still available, no one has lost anything in the short-term, and there's time to pick a realistic option for the long-term.

Finally, at some point the complainers here will have to realize that those of us who like iMovie 08, LIKE IT! Not because it's the latest, not because we're apologetic (nothing for anyone -- least of all Apple -- to apologize for), and not because it's different or new. We like it because it works BETTER than 06 for its primary purpose. And by a pretty wide margin. I certainly wouldn't go back. It's not enough for you? I can respect that, but other options exist.

Yikes, why are people so het up about '08?

It's easy -- use 08 for simple stuff, HD or FCP/FCPE for tight-edit material.

Even then, skimming has to be the dog's b***s, no matter what level edit you're at.

@ Odyssey67

Please don't delude yourself into thinking you speak for the people. The Apple fanboys who think that Apple owes them something are becoming a minority. The actual people who are switching to Mac will be more than impressed with iMovie '08.

I'm happy to see the change in iMovie and am impressed to know that Apple has what it takes to completely rewrite their programs. I can see a multitude of people who will now be able to show their home and vacation videos to friends with a little more style.

In short, get over yourself.

@ThePeople

Odyssey67 speaks for me, and if you took the time to go to the iMovie discussion forums to look objectively at the concerns listed there, you would see that the majority of iLife users are not happy with iMovie 08.

Then you said...
"I can see a multitude of people who will now be able to show their home and vacation videos to friends with a little more style." - the actual truth is, it will be with LESS style since many of the features that allowed you to create videos with style were taken out. What you have now is magicmovie. It's quick, it's fast, it uploads to youtube. But it doesn't have near the capabilities of iMovie 06, so let's not pretend it does.

"For audio, the movie can be brought into GarageBand for soundtrack editing if desired. For those of you yelling for more advanced features, this is just like its big brothers FCE and FCP, who also farm out soundtrack duties to another app."

In Final Cut Pro you can still pen multiple audio tracks, process multiple audio tracks, edit multiple audio tracks etc. within the program - just like you used to be able to do in iMovie.

Sure, export audio to an external application if you really need to do this, but in a large number of projects it is not necessary nor expedient to do so.

It's a shame Apple didn't integrate some of the new interesting features they've come up with into the framework of the existing iMovie instead of sticking with dumbing their applications down to the lowest common denominator.

I feel for the developers who once again are left out in the cold.

I don't care what the iMovie discussion boards are saying. Throwing that out as a reason is like the anti-apple/anti-iPods folks who cite the number of iPod failures posted on the internet... Failures, of which, out of 100 million there are realtively few.

The internet is a megaphone for the meek...

I used iMovie 6. Dog slow on my intel 20" iMac with 2 gig of ram.
Slowly, laboriously, I built my slideshow trying to control the starting point zoom and the end zoom. What a PAIN! Buggy as all hell because there was ZERO consistency on what to expect - some zoomed properly, some would center themselves as I zoomed out or in or NOT...

Then came iMovie 8 - very SMART zooms showed the zoom-in and zoom out SIMULTANEOUSLY with control over each.

Took a whole 5 minutes to learn. And was more flexible and powerful. I truly learned the program immediately, unlike the old iMovie, which, though simple, took a lot longer before I was functional, maybe a day or so.

Clearly another winner. And clearly, we'll hear the whiners. Who can still use the old one.... But don't wanna. Whaaaa! Poor things!! And to think Steve Jobs owes them a living... Tragic.

As someone who has actually sat down and USED iMovie 08, I can say this is a great upgrade. The UI is way smarter, there is no rendering required, and cutting is amazingly fast - even faster than final cut. I'm very impressed with iMovie 08.

Ofcourse, when you change things radically, human beings whine and panic. And this is why the macs market share is relatively low - people are used to Windows.

I think you are all missing the big pictue here. Yes iMovie 08 dropped many features but also added several new ones. So having heard this ad nauseum doesn't explain why rhe RDF made such a drastic change. It's really very simple. iMovie 06 cannot scale to really small devices like iPhone. Think of the possabilities and headlines. iMovie on your iPhone or better yet iLife. Maybe even iWork-so much for the NOT FOR BUSNESS argument. Yes yes I know it doesn't do video (yet). I also know the screen is probabily too small. However perhaps a ultra mobile laptop or handheld (iMacbook or iPad perhaps) with a screen anywhere between 7 & 11 inches whould be Killer. Steve has something up his sleeve always does the unexespected. If you look at it in terms of hardware advancement this could be huge and put the final nail in the coffin of WinCE. Also with Leopard coming I believe HD video will arrive necessitating perhaps spliting up iTunes store into mutiple stores ie: iTunes iMovie iTV iPhoto exc. This would help in also boosting AppleTV. If this were followed by streaming games from your computer to the TV (iPlay) that would be the nail in the coffin of Media Center & Xbox thereby destroying a decades worth of
Microsucks initatives. All this simply by making iLife simpler. The multistore concept in iLife could be under a single umbrela app (iMedia or iStore).