The Sky is NOT Falling

[Pete Zimowski]

About iMovie3:  I purchased the iLife box this last weekend, installed
everything, and have had some time to do some poking around.  Like the guy
at SlashDot, I grabbed a folder with 65 640x480 jpegs (built for a project
in FCP) and 5 DV movie files, and dropped the contents into the clips pane.
Sure enough, I waited a good 30 minutes while it rendered the jpegs into
what was the default 5 seconds of DV for each one.  As far as I can tell,
the only place to tell iMovie how long each jpeg should be rendered for is
in the Ken Burns effect window, with the Duration slider.  It stays wherever
you put it last, so if you're working on a project and stretch one jpeg into
a 10 secs KBE (Ken Burns Effect), if you don't change that 10 secs Duration
slider setting, the next jpeg you try to import into the project will take a
long time to render, trying to make a 10 secs DV file to work with.  One
work around for this is to set the Duration slider to something like 1 or 2
secs, THEN import the jpeg.  If you make it longer later, you'll have to
re-render, but that's considerably shorter than the half hour wait...

I just used my Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge to import some data from my old
Sony 8mm camcorder, and it worked flawlessly, with no jumpiness or audio
sync problems.  I'm using it on a Dual 800 Quicksilver with 768MB RAM.
Haven't put it to the full test on my TiBook 500, but what I did do was
acceptable.

I agree with the previous poster that this is really a 1.0 release of
essentially a new product - it does things in subtly different ways, but I
think on the whole, better ways.  Another important point, I think, is that
some posters on these other groups think that iMovie3 is, or should be,
Final Cut Express.  It's not.  From my perspective, it does what it's
supposed to do, and my guess is it wasn't released as a beta because in
Apple's testing it did everything well.  Let's face it, iMovie is meant to
be an entry-level, bundled on new computers (how many of the real
complainers have older, tricked out machines), average-joe editing app and I
think it's good for that.

By the way, I did discover that anything you can open in Quicktime, you can
import into iMovie3 without first taking it to QT and Exporting to DV, which
you couldn't do, I think, in iMovie2.

Sorry for the dissertation.

:-)

Pete