[MacDV] Quips & Quibbles with iMovie 3 (long)

[Dan Crumpler]

Mike,

You are 100% on target.

This new iMovie 3 is an abomination and an exercise in futility if you 
want to just get your work done. After finishing this morning's school 
announcements (a 7:00 am job that I can get done in peace before the 
kids - middle school, pour in) I tried  iMovie 3 out. Thankfully the 
finished tape was already in hand as we laboriously tried to grind 
through some simple editing using a G4 dual 500 with a gig of memory.

I bailed out after wasting 30 minutes, rebooted into 9.2, went back to 
iMovie 2.11 and was able to finally load up the file, clean up the crud 
from version 3. As far as I am concerned, that's the way my machine will 
stay too. Life is too short to throw away time trying to nursemaid 
Apple's folly into a working product.

While I hope that Apple never quits supporting the old working software 
that allows simple people like me to finish their work efficiently, I 
think the writing is already on the wall. I'd rather switch to a decent 
Windows system that just works than put up up with this foolishness from 
Apple.

Dan

Michael Winter wrote:

> 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
>
>
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