Splice Now

The debate over iMovie ’08 continues — with many people expressing disappointment over the loss of timeline, visual effects and sound functions. I haven’t used it and I’m not sure if I ever will. But I love the idea of it. Why? Three reasons:

First, it embodies a clear and uncompromising point of view about what the “end user” really wants. And it fearlessly throws away old ideas to get there.

Second, it comes from the mind of one person. According to Apple, it was initially developed by one engineer, who, frustrated with current tools, including iMovie, created something else, at first just for himself. Groups rarely design great software. People do.

Third, it includes new user interface elements (skimming) that increase human/machine bandwidth. You feel a connection to the software because it does a better job of connecting to your nervous system. Think of the mouse, the iPod’s scroll wheel, or the iPhone’s multi-touch screen. They all connect you to the machine much more closely than what came before. You have a greater sense of control, and you enjoy using the machine more.

Frankly, I’m also unmoved by all this nostalgia for the old iMovie. The notion that it allowed for precise editing is silly. It was impossible to trim a cut carefully or do all kinds of things professionals expect. And it was slow. The idea that there wasn’t a better way was never credible to me.

Finally, the new iMovie is designed to shine in all-digital work environments, which frankly, is where the consumer (and everybody else) is going, sooner rather than later. I’d be very surprised if any home user is shooting on tape five years from now.

Apple now has a new platform. And they’ll add all kinds of features as time goes by. Creative destruction is what new things are made of.

Technorati Tags: iMovie

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

When Apple didn’t release an upgrade to the iLife suite at this year’s Macworld, some people speculated that an announcement would have stolen focus from the iPhone, or that perhaps the new version was only going to work with Leopard. But now that iLife ’08 has been released, I think the reason might have been that it just wasn’t ready. An awful lot of work has gone into these applications — a new level of interface slickness and integration.

You can watch an excellent introduction to the new features here: iLife 08 Guided Tour. Apple has been moving to slick, highly produced, video-based tutorials. This one not only gives you a look at all the new features, but offers useful information and training. (Avid is putting up free training videos, too. Check them out here: Media Composer videos.)

My first impression of iLife is its user focus. They’ve consistently asked “what does the customer want to do” and answered it throughout the program. From a development standpoint, It’s always easier to ask “what can the machine do?” Apple’s approach can limit choices, but if done right, it’s much more intuitive for the user. That takes time, money and vision.

iLife, like the recent changes to the Final Cut Suite, focuses on high-bandwidth visual feedback. For example, they now offer something called “skimming.” Click and drag on a clip in iMovie to shuttle through it. Move your cursor over an image in iPhoto to flip through all the images in a gallery.

Overall, iMovie is the biggest surprise, because it’s been completely rewritten. It’s now designed as a library manager, more like iPhoto and iTunes, and as a way to quickly slam cuts together, add some music and automatically publish the results to the web. The old iMovie was very DV-centric. The new version seems to be format-agnostic. And it adopts Apple’s new media application look and feel — dark backgrounds, lighting effects on surfaces.

There’s been a lot of debate (for example, here and here) about the new iMovie, primarily because many capabilities have been eliminated. For starters, there’s no timeline at all. And there are far fewer visual effects (but none require rendering). You select material by simply dragging over a clip icon, so precise editing is nearly impossible. My sense from the guided tour is that the program excels in the kind of quick and dirty editing we see more and more now, and I suspect that it will appeal to many people.

Though I like the browsing and publishing features, with such limited editing controls I doubt that I’ll have much use for it. But it represents a vision of what the consumer wants, and whether it succeeds or fails I have to give Apple credit for aggressively rethinking entrenched ideas and trying something new.

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