Over the past few weeks I have had some time to use iMovie and so far have done my unboxing video and burnt a DVD of my dads wedding and I did some video for set changes in a school play Educating Rita which was fun. As you can see I have spent a lot of time in iMovie since I got my mac. I thought that I would tell you what I thought of iMovie compared to other video editing options.
iMovie has some great features but what hit me first was how easy it was to use. We simply plugged in the Cannon HV20 with the tape at the beginning and just simply pressed import then it asked us if we wanted full HD and we said yes and off it went. Once the video was imported the interface was very obvious and the buttons explained themselves. Then there is the exporting options, these are so useful the youtube and then the normal export ect… save so much time. iMovie is the most stable video editing package I have used and most compatible with all the formats I use, which makes it so much easier to edit everything. I have used 3 cameras in iMovie a JVC hard drive and 2 Mini DV cameras and they all worked perfectly.
You’ve certainly done plenty of video recently, despite the distractions of school work! I have thoroughly enjoyed using iMovie, finding it so easy to edit and to export video. Much easier to edit than Final Cut which I have also used; and way easier to export the movie in suitable formats – especially for YouTube. Also much better than Adobe Premiere on a PC which I used a lot before the summer. Besides being less friendly to edit, it proved impossible to get decent quality video exported from it except at full quality avi (lots of gigabytes).
There are only two things that annoy me in iMovie and the first is not being able to edit the sound track, without going to the fiddle of adding it separately. The second is that Once I’ve imported video from my JVC hard drive camera into Final Cut, I then can’t get it into iMovie. It would be great to be able to share the event libraries between them. iMovie does not recognise the .MOD files from the JVC excpet when they are on the camera.
One thing I do love about iMovie is that I can do rough editing, adding the sections of the video that I want from the event library to a project. Then I can continue editing in the event library – either deleting clips, trimming start and end of clips, and even removing bits from the middle of clips without any fuss – couldn’t do that in Final Cut without adding a clip twice. And of course, you can scrub across any clip with the mouse, whether in the event library or in the project view. I swap project and event windows for the second stage of editing to give myself more room. Titling is ever so easy too. A great package!
Love your videos too!