Making movies with iMovie '09

I didn't like the last version of iMovie, the movie making component of Apple's iLife suite. That was the '08 version. iLife is a suite of applications installed on all new Macs; for those with older Macs running previous versions of iLife, you pay $179 for a new version - that means all new iPhoto, GarageBand, iDVD, iWeb and iMovie.

The iLife '06 'High Definition' version was excellent, with a simple linear editing interface that let you separate the audio track from the original footage and add another music or other audio track to that.

You could step through your movie frame by frame, balancing one audio track against the other in a similar manner to editing volumes in GarageBand.

The only bad thing about iMovie '06 was the rendering. Every time you added an effect or a transition, you had wait while it rendered before you could proceed.

Then along came iMovie 7, part of last year's iLife '08. It really threw the baby out with the bath water. The interface was completely different, so anyone experienced with '06 was completely flummoxed by it. Apple became aware enough of the criticism it let people download iMovie '06 HD for free in its place.

But if you were completely new to movie editing, iMovie in iLife '08 seemed easy to learn. Not only that, the resulting movies were really slick and beautiful. Now there's a whole new version. Apple has kept the best features of the iLife '08 version and added more precise editing options, and render times are gone - everything happens in real time.

iMovie '09 works a little more like iPhoto now. Movie clips appear as Events from which you drag clips into a Project space. You can skim over the clips in the bin just like skimming Events in iPhoto.

To get clips from your video camera, you start with a much more fully-featured Import window. Before you press Import, you can preview footage and name the Event for future reference. You can also Import it to switch to your Mac's built-in iSight camera for shooting instant, albeit low-res, footage, by the way.

You can turn on Image Stabilisation in the Import stage. This new feature of iMovie '09 slows down the import by a factor of about four as iMovie analyses every frame and crops edges off to a greater or lesser extent, using the untouched middle elements of the images to render the 'stabilised' content.

I tested iMovie '09 with footage from a new Canon Legria FS200 handycam. It's pretty slick. A few years ago I interviewed a top bloke from SanDisk, the US manufacturer of flash storage products. It immediately became clear that, when flash storage got cheap enough, the form factor of pretty much every device that requires storage would change.

Five years on, Apple released the super-slim MacBook Air. Even though most Airs still have hard drives, you can tell the thin laptop was designed with disk-less SSD drives in mind (it's an option).

Now even video cameras can be tiny - this Legria is a powerful video camera that's tiny and light because it doesn't need a heavy, clunky tape transport. The FS200 fits easily into the palm of my not overly large hand yet still has a 39x optical zoom lens. It can record over three hours in highest quality video to a 16GB SDHC. There's no viewfinder; you have to use its big 2.7-inch LCD display. It's not high def (Canon does make HD handycams that also shoot to SD cards) but it shoots widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio as standard.

Apple was not that good at supporting tapeless handycams a year ago, but it seems sorted now. With the FS200, I did not put a single one of the several included CDs of Canon software anywhere near my Mac. I just plugged the Legria in via its supplied USB2 cable, pressed the button on the swing-out LCD to flip it into Play mode, use the toggle to go from DVD Burner to PC/Printer and pressed the toggle in (the 'Set' switch) and immediately, the iMovie '09 detected it, generated 'Poster Images' and loaded the frames into iMovie's Import dialogue.

Another new option is a full-screen preview mode with Apple's 'Cover Flow' style browser letting you visually switch to other projects.

You can actually adjust clips in the lower bin without even putting them into a Project - if you put your mouse over a a clip and you'll notice a little sun icon. Click it and a pop-out appears giving you access to the options Clip Adjustments, Video Adjustments, Audio Adjustments and Cropping & Rotation.

This means you can quickly fix footage before you even start working on it. Thanks to the Events metaphor, you can drag clips from several different events to make up a new project. But some new tools are not turned on by default: Go to Preferences>General and turn on Show Advanced Tools for the dual-mode toolbar, Keyword controls, cutaways, picture-in-picture, green screen, more replace modes and chapter markers.

Once the clips are in your Project area, you can use the new Precision Editor. In this new interface, you slide clips past each other to precisely pick a crossover point, and trim and move the audio separately, including tracks and audio effects dragged in from the media browser.

The audio appears as a green field behind the clips - you can grab this and drag it around (it turns purple to show you've moved it) and also edit it, dragging a volume slider up or down - but this affords nowhere near the precise volume editing I would prefer. You could always strip the audio out of your project and dump the whole thing into GarageBand to score it, but audio can make or break a movie and I dearly wish Apple had put iMovie '06's audio ability into this version.

But the new iMovie has a great new titles feature with more options than before. They animate in thumbnails to help you work out what you want.

Backgrounds are cool though, especially since you can drop and scale movie footage over a coloured or even animated background. Another good feature is a Themes set you can add to any project to instantly generate a movie that looks slick. Theme choices are limited but they're fast, and you can switch a theme completely and it updates the whole project. It's a replacement for the old Magic Movie feature and it mimics careful editing in a flash - but I want the audio features back, Apple!

 

- Mark Webster mac.nz