iMovie: The Missing Manual

Introduction

Whether this is your first time using iMovie or you’re an old hand, you have a lot to look forward to. iMovie is incredibly powerful software, but you might not know it from the surface. Under the hood, it does intensely complex things (like stabilizing shaky footage) that video editors in the past would’ve sold their children for.

And that’s the whole point of iMovie, to do amazing things with your footage without requiring years (or even days) of expertise. Still, when you first open the software, you won’t realize all of iMovie’s full power. This book will introduce you to iMovie, diving into all its features (and even into a few nooks and crannies), so you can draw on all its abilities.

The Difficult Birth of the New iMovie

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, ...