Quips & Quibbles with iMovie 3 (long)

[Michael Winter]

I really wanted to like iMovie 3, but I'm having enough trouble with it 
I think I'm going back to 2.1. I'm hoping that by posting my experience 
some of the experts on the list may be able to help me out.

The system I'm using is a dual 1 GHz Quicksilver with 1.5 GB RAM 
running OS 10.2.3. For video in I'm using a Sony Digital Media 
Convertor.

Launching iMovie 3 takes much longer, but I think that's related to the 
last edited project. So if I open a project that was created in iMovie 
2, it seems to take forever. Opening projects made in iMovie 3 takes 
less time, but even opening a "blank" project seems to take longer than 
iMovie 2.

Importing video seems to work fine, except when I switch from importing 
to editing, then back to importing, I get the no camera message. I have 
to quit iMovie and restart to get it back (this works every time).

I guess the other thing to mention is that during the import I 
sometimes get a wide black band either on the left of the view or on 
the top and bottom. This had me really worried, but when I go back to 
look at the clips after capturing them, the bands are gone. I'm 
wondering if the display is messed up because I resized the window and 
it has to take a few shortcuts to display in real time.

The user interface seems very slow. I click on a clip and it will take 
a second (literally) for it to show in the viewer window, then another 
second for the "scrubber" triangle to appear. I'm actually over there 
with the mouse pointer waiting for it to appear. OTOH, the non-UI stuff 
seems to be just as fast if not faster. If I push the right arrow on 
the keyboard to view a clip in iMovie 2, I can watch each frame go by, 
In iMovie 3, it seems to scroll by faster than real time.

Can anyone explain the clip selection logic? Seems like if I move a 
clip, or sometimes just click on it once, it does not become the 
selected clip. I have to click on it a second time.

So I've done a bit of editing and its time to export to QuickTime. 
Because of some problems with iMovie 2 coming to a halt if in the 
background, I've gotten in the habit of exporting to "Full Quality DV" 
then using Quicktime Pro to do the conversions. The good news is that 
this is now unnecessary because iMovie 3 will continue at full speed 
even when in the background. The bad news is that when I export to Full 
Quality DV my audio ends up out of sync. That's never happened before. 
I was hoping to use this method to get to VCD until Roxio gets their 
plug-in updated.

Some other things I've noticed with exporting:

If you Export to QuickTime and use "Expert" you get the same dialog box 
you get when exporting using QuickTime Player and QuickTime Pro. You 
even get the same progress bar, which means you don't get an estimated 
time to completion.

When I finally hit the "Export" button and get the file dialog to tell 
it where to export to, more funny things happen. First, I want to 
change the default name of the output file, but I can't select just the 
part before the "dot". I either get the whole file name or just fhe dot 
and what's after. I can however use the arrow and delete keys to 
accomplish the task or just type in the whole name.

When I try to navigate to a different drive to save the file, part of 
the file listing pops up outside the dialog box. With a few repeated 
attempts I can get what I want if I ignore the "ghost".

Three times now I've had exports that didn't work. There is no error 
message and no file created other than  a 4 kB .mov file in the project 
folder. I haven't figure out what happened in these cases, but I did 
notice that the export did not take as long as it should have (twice I 
was exporting to mp4, once to full quality DV).

My plan for now, since I installed iMovie3 using the System Update 
method, is to go on a seek and destroy mission to get rid of everything 
iMovie related, then do a "clean" iMovie 3 install. If that doesn't 
clear some things up its back to iMovie2.

-Mike