iMovie `09 and My Migration Down Apple’s Product Line

I don’t know how many people use video the way I do, but I hope my ramblings here maybe helpful to someone.

A few years ago, after Heap CRM became primarily a hosted service (compared to a server product), I decided the best way to illustrate a tutorial or lesson was with video. Understand, I had absolutely no experience with video (I still have very little). But, after a bit of training and asking a lot of questions it became clear I needed to buy pro apps; lots of pro apps.

In the course of the next month it seemed as thought I purchased every video related app that Apple made. I bought Logic because I need to be able to clean up the voice over, Final Cut because I needed a precision editor, Motion because I needed it for title sequences and zoom effects.

These apps weren’t just expensive, they were complicated. As someone who used these programs at most once a month (compared to the target market who has specially colored keyboards for Final Cut), *every time* I used them was a little bit like the first time.

What’s a bit amazing about this is it looks like at the end of the month I’m going to replace the last piece of this equation (Final Cut) with iMovie ’09. How did this happen?

It started with GarageBand. In attempt to compete in the emerging podcast market, they added “podcast studio” which included pre-configured voice tracks. Suddenly with one click I could get a cleaner track from GarageBand then I could ever get from Logic. Now, I know a professional audio engineer could get a better recording through Logic, but I can’t — I don’t know what I’m doing.

Following that, ScreenFlow came out and replaced any need to try to zoom in and out and an update to QuickTime Pro made using Compressor pointless (at least for me). All that remained was Final Cut for the actual editing.

In truth even before last Tuesday’s announcement I was trying to phase Final Cut out. ScreenFlow has a decent editor and I would generally do as much as I could there before migrating the video file over. But with the new iMovie this will become unnecessary.

What’s special about iMovie ’09? Let’s start with the precision editor. In Final Cut, the way you make a precise edit is you zoom the timeline way in. This zooms everything, secondly you typically have to turn “snapping” off (which is normally a good thing). By separating this editing mode from traditional editing, Apple has allowed you to have settings appropriate to fine tune editing without messing up your standard settings.

`09 also introduces “freeze frame,” something the Final Cut has done forever, but completely necessary. This is for when doing something in the application takes a much shorter time then the audio to explain it. To keep the two in sync, often you must insert repeat images of screen so the audio can catch up.

Finally, iMovie has a “green-screen” feature. Ok, I know you can use a green-screen in Final Cut, but I’ve never been able to get it to work. I always end up with noticeable green (or blue, depending on the screen I’m using). I’m hoping the GS feature for iMovie will be a similar experience to podcast studio in GarageBand: dummies allowed.

Is there a lesson to all this? If you already have some sort of setup and you understand it, probably not. But, if you are looking at getting into video for tutorials and looking to purchase pro apps, first take a look iLife.