[MacDV] Re: Quips & Quibbles with iMovie 3 (long)
H. Eddie Reed
mac_ed at bellsouth.net
Mon Feb 3 15:52:09 PST 2003
Whoa ! That was a mouth full !!
Well this is not the first I have heard in regards to iMovie3's poor
design. My question is ...
I'm still downloading iM3 and was wondering if there would be a way to
keep both iMovie2 as well as 3 ? You know in case I feel as Mike and Dan
do about the latest version I could switch back ?
Am I trying to have my cake and eat it too >?
Not sure if the update is really what I should do..
<Eddie>
On Monday, February 3, 2003, at 05:36 PM, Dan Crumpler wrote:
> 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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