Supposedly, iMovie ’08 was conceptualized at the project manager’s scuba diving trip with his family, brought back to Apple, and used to redesign one of their major iLife applications from the ground up. The change was so different, that Apple decided to change the time-tested icon of the program, but keep the same name.
Having made the majority of my media projects with iMovie HD and previous, I was very comfortable with the older program, and was very weary of the upgrade after having played with it in the Apple Store. Needless to say, I got Leopard with my new MBP and quickly forgot about it, not having anything on my media-plate that I needed to worry about.
More recently, I had two family events recently where I was asked to make some slideshow-esque movies with one of them having video intermingled. I used an iMac with Tiger and a previous version of iLife for the first one that required some movie clips, and went to the new iMovie ’08 for the photo/music-only project, leaving my room for error small, and allowing me to stick my toe in the “water”.
The water was freezing cold.
The new iMovie may make things easy for newcomers, and may be something that is intuitive and wonderful and a dream come true for aspiring computer owners, moving along from a typewriter, but it is no where near a comparable succession down the product line of iMovie. Joked one unhappy user “I wish the [project manager] had just stayed on vacation.” Overall, from an experienced user of the previous iMovie versions, the new program is frustrating, feature-less, and unintuitive. No timeline, no seemingly advanced features, no “side bar” to store unused clips. Selecting multiple clips is annoying and tedious(either I’m a fool or shift-clicking doesn’t work.) Transitions and effects feel like their lacking. Did I mention there wasn’t a true timeline, and the visual aspects of the program don’t let you move them to your liking? (Which you would almost expect that they’d provide a switch to hit and give you the old iMovie “feel” with the new iMovie backend
However, (and much to my delight), Apple has heard the groans and responded to the unhappy community. For those who own iLife ’08, you may download – for free – iMovie HD ’06. It’ll be interesting to see if we get to see another refresh of this program go back to its older iterations at MacWorld ’09. (Although – some say Apple’s redesign of iMovie to a more basic platform was to promote the purchase of Final Cut Express. While I would hope this isn’t the case, its not an entirely baseless accusation.)
