iMovie '08 Initial Thoughts

I ordered the new iLife '08 suite from the Apple Online Store on Tuesday night, and received the installation discs yesterday (unexpectedly fast!). Around 2:00 a.m. this morning, I decided to give the new (and vastly changed) iMovie a quick, insomniacal spin.

In literally 10 minutes I went from having nothing but a previously-recorded piece of music to a video uploaded on YouTube. No, I don’t mean I was exporting it after 10 minutes. I mean it had been recorded, edited, modified, exported and uploaded within 10 minutes - viewable online 2 minutes later.

Nothing special, as videos go, but the speed of this process is astounding. iMovie '08 might not be for you if you’re interested in doing semi-professional editing (you can use iMovie HD 6 for that, or more appropriately, FinalCut Express), but if you’re a video blogger, podcaster, or YouTuber, I can’t think of a better solution for making quick, quality stuff.

The best part of the new interface is that iMovie acts as a clip manager (like iPhoto does for pics), which means that as you add more video to your library, grabbing snippets from other sessions to remix and quote becomes super-easy. It’s practically copy-paste, drag-and-drop. And that’s easy.



My late-night iMovie test