Splice Now

The new iMovie seems to represent a different paradigm for consumer editing — faster, less precise, designed for a tapeless workflow. It was discussed in some depth on last week’s MacBreak Weekly podcast and the consensus there was that it might be very useful for quickly throwing together a super-rough cut. It has one very important secret weapon: “Export to Final Cut Pro.” If you’re missing something, and iMovie ’08 is missing a lot of things, then you get yourself Final Cut Express or Final Cut Studio and move your project straight into it, courtesy of XML and Quicktime.

The program seems to be extremely easy to learn. It doesn’t offer a lot of options — it just does the right thing. For example, if it sees a mounted digital video source it just starts importing video from it, no questions asked. We may see producers or directors creating rough “idea” cuts in iMovie, and then handing the thing off to real editors who can make it work. (But there are problems, too. Scott Simmons has posted some interesting observations on his site.)

Rhetorical question: Is there an upgrade path from Pinnacle Studio to Media Composer? I don’t know for sure, but I’d have to wager that the answer is no. You can move a project from Studio to Pinnacle’s Liquid line. But that just begs the question. Doesn’t Avid want to see young editors moving all the way up to Media Composer?

Technorati Tags: avid, final cut pro, iMovie

This entry was posted on August 19, 2007 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Consumer Editing, User Interface, Workflow. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.