PAGE 7 OF 13 The Mac Guild – December 2003
Mac Guild Reviews
APPLE IMOVIE 3
Reviewed By Diane Love
Review systems
iMac 1Ghz G4, 1GB memory, 80 GB hard disk, 1440 x 900 display
Review Project
Turn 3 DV tapes and 100+ digital images of an annual open-air musical event into DVDs!
Introduction
iMovie is the modern "killer app" for the Mac versus Windows. Amazingly, what we take for granted on
Macs - that we can capture video, edit it and turn it into finished video or DVD - is still hard going for PC
users.
Even on Macs though, it's hasn't always been easy. Video capture is very demanding of processor
speed, memory, disk space and disk transfer speeds. An older machine may cease to work for video
when a new version of the operating system makes increased demands.
This was the position I was left in when I discovered that the video I had captured from the 2002 event
would no longer play glitch-free on our 500MHz iBook.
Around the time of the 2003 event I got a new iMac, equipped with a DVD burner and pre-loaded with the
iLife suite.
Upgrading to iMovie 3
With iMovie 3 on my new machine I was able to capture the DV from the 2003 event without issue and
edit the movies pretty quickly. Having done that, I then connected up the firewire disk containing the
nearly finished project of the 2002 event and finished that too. After all the DVDs were burned, labeled
and distributed, my review copy of "iMovie 3 and iDVD the Missing Manual" arrived. Here I discovered
that it's actually not a good idea to work on an iMovie 2 project in iMovie 3 - you are recommended to
finish it in iMovie 2. Seems I got lucky.
Improvements over previous versions
For me the worst feature of the previous iMovie was the infamous ghostly triangles. Given that the
program was designed to edit video, you'd think the controls for selecting points to cut, copy and paste
would have been visible and easy to manipulate. Incredibly, in the previous iMovie neither was true.
Working on my own, I never discovered how to use the ghostly triangles that occasionally flitted around
the scrubber bar but disappeared when I tried to grab them with the mouse. I did discover you could split
the clip at the playhead, move the playhead, split again and then throw away the unwanted part inside or
outside the cuts. "iMovie 2 the Missing Manual" explained precisely how to conquer the ghostly
triangles, and iMovie 3 makes them visible and easy to use. For better or worse though, I like to use my
split clip at playhead method, since I like to focus on defining one cut point at a time.
New in iMovie 3, the Ken Burns effect allows you to add motion to stills that you incorporate into your
video. You can define a start point and zoom level and an end point and zoom level, and iMovie then
constructs a clip from the photo. This is a lifesaver for people who like to park their camcorder on a tripod
and video themselves playing with their band - the static view from the tripod gets old when nobody is
zooming in on solos. If you have photos from the event, you can cut to closeups moving and crossfading
through each other while the sound is still running, and end up with more interesting video. Another
application is to create movies from stills only.
So how do you find the right still photos to incorporate? The iLife link to iPhoto vastly improves workflow
even if you know which of the stills in your iPhoto library you want. I found myself working with both
iMovie and iPhoto simultaneously. In iPhoto, I was examining the stills in detail, choosing the ones with
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