iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Introduction

iMovie is video-editing software. It grabs a copy of the raw footage from your digital camcorder or still camera. Then it lets you edit this video easily, quickly, and creatively.

That's a big deal, because over the years, home movies have developed a bad name. You know what it's like watching other people's camcorder footage. You're captive on some neighbor's couch after dessert to witness 60 excruciating, unedited minutes of a trip to Mexico, or 25 too many minutes of the baby wearing the spaghetti bowl.

Deep down, most people realize that the viewing experience could be improved if the video were edited down to just the good parts. But until iMovie came along, editing camcorder footage on the computer required several thousand dollars' worth of digitizing cards, extremely complicated editing software, and the highest-horsepower computer equipment available. Unless there was a paycheck involved, editing footage under those circumstances just wasn't worth it.

Then along came iMovie, the world's least expensive version of what the Hollywood pros call nonlinear editing software. The "nonlinear" part is that no tape is involved while you're editing. There's no rewinding or fast-forwarding; you jump instantly to any piece of footage as you put your movie together.

The world of video is exploding. People are giving each other DVDs instead of greeting cards. People are watching each other via video on their Web sites. People are quitting their daily-grind jobs to become videographers for hire, making money filming weddings and creating living video scrapbooks. Video, in other words, is fast becoming a new standard document format for the new century.

If you have iMovie and a camcorder, you'll be ready.

The Difficult Birth of iMovie '08 and '09

Within six months of its release in October 1999, iMovie had become, in the words of beaming iMovie papa (and Apple CEO) Steve Jobs, "the most popular video editing software in the world."

Apple only fanned the flames when it released iMovie 2 in July 2000 (for $50), iMovie 3 in January 2003 (for free), and then—as part of the iLife software suite—iMovie 4, iMovie HD, and iMovie 6 in successive Januaries.

Then, in August 2007, Apple dropped a bombshell. Or, rather, it dropped iMovie.

The company's new consumer video editing program, called iMovie '08, was, in fact, not iMovie at all. It was a totally different program, using all-new code and a different design, and built by different people. It was conceived, according to Steve Jobs, by Randy Ubillos, an Apple programmer who wanted to edit down his vacation footage—but found the old iMovie too slow and complicated. So the guy sat down and wrote his own little program, focused primarily on editing speed above all. Steve loved it, and decided that it would replace the old iMovie.

Many people were stunned by Apple's move—and I, your humble author, was among them. In my New York Times email column, I wrote about just how different iMovie '08 was from its predecessors:

iMovie '08 has been totally misnamed. It's not iMovie at all. It's designed for an utterly different task.

The new iMovie, for example, is probably the only video editing program on the market with no timeline—no horizontal, scrolling strip that displays your clips laid end to end, with their lengths representing their durations. You have no indication of how many minutes into your movie you are.

The new iMovie also gets a D for audio editing. You can't manually adjust audio levels during a scene (for example, to make the music quieter when someone is speaking). All the old audio effects are gone, too. No pitch changing, high-pass and low-pass filters, or reverb.

The new iMovie doesn't accept plug-ins, either. You can't add chapter markers for use in iDVD, which is supposed to be integrated with iMovie. Bookmarks are gone. Themes are gone. You can no longer export only part of a movie. And you can't export a movie back to tape—only to the Internet or to a file.

All visual effects are gone—even basic options like slow motion, reverse motion, and fast motion. Incredibly, the new iMovie can't even convert older iMovie projects. All you can import is the clips themselves. None of your transitions, titles, credits, music, or special effects are preserved.

On top of all that, this more limited iMovie has steep horsepower requirements that rule out most computers older than about two years old.

Pretty harsh, I know. But listen, I was an absolute whiz at iMovie 6. I knew it like the back of my mouse. And it looked to me like Apple was junking that mature, powerful program for what amounted to a video slideshow program.

Fortunately, many of those "doesn't haves" were restored in iMovie '09. Furthermore, iMovie '09 comes with so many useful features of its own, it's far more difficult to resist.

It's far more modern than the old iMovie, for example. It's equally adept at importing video from the new tapeless camcorders (DVD, hard drive, or memory-card models)—and from digital still cameras—as it is at importing from tape. And it's all hooked up to the Web, so that a single command can post your masterpiece on YouTube.

Then there are the cool features that the old iMovie could only dream about. The image-stabilizing, color-correction, and frame-cropping tools are unprecedented in a consumer program. You can really, truly delete unwanted pieces of your clips, thus reclaiming hard drive space. (iMovie '08, on the other hand, preserves an entire 20-minute clip on your hard drive even if you've used only 3 seconds of it.)

iMovie '09 creates titles, crossfades, and color adjustments instantly. There's no "rendering" time, as there was in the old iMovie. So you gain an exhilarating freedom to play, to fiddle with the timing and placement of things.

So, no, iMovie '09 is not a descendant of the old iMovies. It's a different program, with a different focus and a different audience. But it's here to stay, and it has charms of its own.