Spent the Evening with iMovie 11

Holy crap! I spent the evening going thru tutorials and trying to cut a mockup 30 sec. music video. I hope to hell that FCP X has more to offer than iMovie 11. The first nightmare was take a 3 min audio track and make it start and end in 30 sec.As a guitarist, cutting around phrases to make the impossible sound good is standard operating procedure. No problem on a normal timeline. Editing audio with the clip editor doesnt allow this process and you dont even see the full duration of the clip on the time line. I got used to marking (rubber banding) and inserting the clips and the precision tool is interesting. But at first blush Premiere Pro/After Effects is looking better and better. I wouldnt consider Media Composer 5.5 because its just to rigid and cumbersome after using FCP 7 and PP (I edited with Avid DS for 12 years so I do have various points of comparison.) I know they are supposed to be different apps, but I saw a lot of the things in iMovie that were present in the Sneak Peek so they seem to share a lot of tool sets. YUCK!

Jeez Loiuse man .... you were playing in iMovie for goodness sakes. Just because they share a similar interface doesn't mean they function identically. Seriously, the iMovie '11 exploration is admirable for a bit of an advance look at the GUI but it maybe would be better to relax a bit on the overall assumptions, Here's an analogy (it may not hold up well but I'll offer it anyway) think of iMovie as the examination room versus FCP X as the operating theatre, the doctor (you) may be able to patch up a patient (an edit) in the examination room if its just a sprain ... but if it's serious you'll get it into surgery asap.

iMovie is not FCP. Certain aspects of the interface have been ported from iMovie & you can gain a leg up on gaining some experience with a lot of tools. However FCPX is not iMovie Pro. Initially I didn't think the magnetic timeline worked in iMovie, but it does exactly what was shown in the demo at the Supermeet. On the other hand the color corrector in iMove is ported from iPhoto whereas the color corrector in FCPX is ported from Color. Nevertheless it's still useful to experience how the in timeline workflow of making temp color corrections is streamlined & can be a big time saver. Press V the HUD comes up so you make adjustment to the Video signal, press A & the HUD changes to allow you to make audio adjustments, Press I and the Hud changes to allow you make changes to the clip like adjusting for rolling shutter & shot stabilization. Again the audio Hud in iMovie is based on Garageband whereas the Hud in FCPX will be coming from Logic & Soundtrack Pro.

iMovie 11 has the time scale at the bottom of the timeline rather than at the top edge as we are accustomed to in FCP. iMovie is designed for people who don't want to know anything about editing. They just want to be able to put something together quickly to show friends & family where they went on their summer vacation. They don't want to know all the pleasure that can be derived by editing with a versatile editing software like FCP, they just want something that will allow them simplistic edit quickly so they can put it aside & get on with their life. They will usually slap a piece of music on the soundtrack & if they duck the audio down under some dialogue or narration they think they have done a sound mix.

I don't expect that we will be getting any of the other FCP Studio applications this year. I really hope all developer time is being spent to port as many functions as is physically possible for the development to port from FCP by the June deadline. It's nice that some minor functions of STP, Motion & Color are being incorporated into FCPX similar to the Motion Templates that could be accessed within FCP 7 without going out to Motion. I am hoping that FCPX will have Sent To commands to Motion 4 STP 3 & Color 1.5 & that there will be Export Import XML to FCP 7 so there can be a workflow
where we can take advantage of the best of both versions of FCP, until the development team have the man hours to port all the code to FCPX.


Dave

Andy, point taken. The Doctor is in and looking forward to some fancy cutting in June. ;-)

No, you can't do a professional edit in iMovie, for all the reasons being mentioned.

However, it is a very good tool for pre-selecting and rough cuts. Especially on set or on the road. Then just export an xml from iMovie, and bring it into FCP for the polishing and finishing.

We were looking for a simple pre-selecting tool for DSLR shoots recently and found it in iMovie. With a little bit of file management effort, it is very easy to create a simple "off-line"/"on-line" workflow that makes good sense and speeds up turn-around.

>I don't expect that we will be getting any of the other FCP Studio applications this
>year.

Release Color and Compressor as part of the suite. Don't even need the send to Color or Compressor option. Have them as stand alone apps. Very handy tools.



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