iMovie
That really is the question, another frustration I have with my new iMac. The operating system is so accommodating, it happily does whatever you tell it to do. Or not. But no matter what, it never complains. Users may not like to see all the error messages you encounter on a PC, but at least with the error messages you know what's going on. The iMac doesn't return any error, ever, from what I can tell, it just silently ignores your command like an obstinate child.
For instance, when I tell iMovie to import a really big .AVI file, it appears to do so. It grays out files that it can't import as movies, and the AVI files aren't grayed out, seems like it should work. After selecting an AVI, it even tells me it's processing afterwards. Then I sit and wait, wondering just how long it takes to import. But it never does import the AVI video because iMovie can't import AVI files, which you can find out by research, but certainly not by the program telling you or returning any errors.
Do you know, the index of the Mac book I bought doesn't even have "error" in the index! Perhaps this is why Mac-nuts rave about how great it is?
iMovie '09 will read from an unencrypted DVD, but it's not as straightforward as you'd expect. The process below will allow you to load your custom DVD video into iMovie, assuming you can see the .VOB files on the DVD.
Typically when looking at the folders on a DVD (in PC Explorer or Mac Finder) you'll see 2 folders. In the VIDEO_TS folder you'll find some IFO and some VOB files. The VOB's are the video files. If there's just one video you want off the DVD, it's typically the largest .vob file.
If you're on a PC, you can often just copy this file to your hard drive and rename it to end in .mpg, and you have a usable file.
To import the .vob file into iMovie '09 on a Mac:
- Insert the DVD. If it automatically begins playing full screen, you can use the Escape key to get out of the full-screen mode in DVD Player. Quit DVD Player or any other player that started.
- Open up Disk Utilities (found in Applications >> Utilities).
- Select the DVD from the list on the left, then click the "New Image" icon. Choose your disk image name, location, and leave the default options. This will take a few minutes, resulting in a new disk image (.dmg) on your hard drive.
- When it's finished, it will now appear on the left side of the Disk Utilities window. We're not finished yet, this alone isn't enough. Start iMovie. With iMovie open in the background, go back to Disk Utilities and double-click the disk image. This will bring up a brief window stating it is Attaching the Disk Image. When it's finished, iMovie will pop up a screen prompting you to import from the Disk Image.
- Select the movie(s) you want to import and click the Import button. Now we're finished!
I've only used it a bit so far, but iMovie appears to meet every basic video editing need except for file types. I'm one of many PC users who switched to Mac largely because of their reputation for excellence, speed and fun in graphic editing, photos and videos especially. I was sorely disappointed to find out that iMovie cannot handle so many standard formats that PC apps handle without thinking. iMovie will import video from your digital video camera, if it's a compatible format, or from a disk it will import DV, MPEG-4 and some .mov formats. That's it.
Quicktime Formats
Ironically not all Quicktime videos (.mov) will open in iMovie, but there is a solution if you have Quicktime Pro (not just the player, you need the for-pay version). If you can open a movie in Quicktime Pro that you want to get into iMovie, "saving" the file as a .mov will not be enough, you'll need to export the movie. Exportimg the Movie to QuickTime Movie was enough to import it into iMovie '09. I would expect that you would have the same success exporting the Movie to MPEG-4 or exporting the Movie to DV Stream, although I haven't tried them. The DV stream will likely produce the best quality.
Note that you can use Quicktime Pro to convert other source video formats as well. Quicktime Pro can open AVI, MPEG-2 and a lot of other formats. Remember however that the more times you convert a video, the more quality you lose. A complete list of formats can be found on Apple's site here.
There are also Mac OS applications you can find with a quick Google search that are supposed to enable multiple formats in iMovie, but I tried some that didn't work. If anyone has some recommendations, feel free to share in the comments.
All iMacs come with the basic iLife application suite on them, which includes iMovie. This is a fun and easy video editing package, ideal for the Mac user hobbyist who has home videos on a compatible tape or disk, and who wants to put together a bunch of clips from the tapes and turn it into a video to be shared with friends via YouTube, DVD, iPod, or their Mac MobileMe Gallery.
iMovie lets you select clips of your videos (or the entire video), arrange them in order, add fun transitions, photographic effects (sepia tone, soft romantic focus, vignettes, cartoon effects and more,) voice overs and soundtracks, even title slides. It has some advanced features such as stabilization for all those hand-held jiggly videos, changing the speed, adding a freeze-frame and normalizing your audio for you, to name a few.
iMovie also works well for creating a slideshow of your photos. Simply drag the photos into the project where you can crop it, add the "Ken Burns" effect (zooming and panning slowly), set the duration, and add transitions between your pictures. You can easily combine pictures and videos in the same movie. Many animated title slides come with it as well, allowing you to create the perfect title intro for your home video.
Best of all, there are a lot of short video tutorials on http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/#imovie that make learning iMovie easy.
There are a couple of things I don't like about the iMac. One is having to relearn keyboard shortcuts. The keyboard shortcuts do not directly translate to a PC, and I never realized how dependent on them I am. Trying to force my middle finger to use CMD-C to copy instead of my pinky requires re-training what my fingers have been doing for over a decade. The Home and End keys on the iMac don't function the same way either. CTRL-A doesn't select all but actually returns you to the beginning of the line, except when you're in a webpage form field, sometimes then it takes you to the previous webpage losing everything you were typing in the form field. Very frustrating!
The only other significant thing I don't like is the operating system has the same opinion about my intelligence as Bill Gates does, that is that the computer knows better where I want my files than I do. NOT TRUE!!! Steve Jobs, give me more credit than that!
For instance, I've been using iMovie to create a movie (more about that tomorrow). When you're finally finished, you don't "Save" your movie, in fact you can't even save your project, you have to go on faith that it's saving it for you (which also means don't work ahead expecting you can "save as" a different filename later - any change you make is made to this one and only version). When you're ready to use the final product, you "Share" it. You can share it in different formats, each choice determines where on the computer it goes, for instance you can share it with iDVD so you can write it to a DVD. But can I find that file anywhere? No, it's not to be found, not even through searching, although I don't know what the filename is which makes it difficult.
If I just want the file itself because I want the file off my iMac and not in one of their pre-determined uses such as an iPod or iDVD, I have to export it. According to Apple documentation, exporting does exactly the same thing and uses the same format as sharing, except exporting allows you to give it a filename and decide where to save it. Imagine that, a user wanting to know what the file is named and where it is.
While I still believe my experience at the Apple Store was superior to most computer experiences, I can't sing their praises too much. I do have to admit that my Specialist (who acknowledged he was new) didn't always give me the correct answers. Not knowing Apple software, I mistakenly assumed iMovie and Final Cut Express could handle all standard PC file formats, such as the .AVI's my clients send me, and he confirmed this. Not true, they import from a variety of current video cameras, but importing movies someone else provides in any format other than Apple formats doesn't work. For those of you who care about this, there are free "drivers" I'll call them for lack of a better word, that make Final Cut Express recognize other formats such as AVI. Google "Perian".
When I asked him about the difference between iMovie and Final Cut Express, one of the things he mentioned was you can't control your iMovies at a finer level than 1/10 of a second. Not true. You can control it by entering in times more precise than that manually, or by magnifying your viewer to 1/2 second segments.
While nothing he told me incorrectly would have been a significant deterent to buying an iMac, it was a bit frustrating to start using it at home and find he was incorrect on a bunch of little things. My advice to any PC user about to make the leap: do your research first, or make sure you get an experienced and knowledgeable Specialist to answer your questions.
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