Monday, November 06, 2006

Down With iMovie!

Okay, I will never again use iMovie again.

Now, I'm in love with my Mac, and I'm all happy with the fact that it comes with the iLife package, which does have some genuinely useful stuff in it, by why the hell do people keep releasing editing software that actually makes the process of video editing harder?

You see, iMovie is not (NOT!) an A-B roll editor, in short you can only use one video source track and then just splice things into it.  This works mostly well I suppose if you only have video from one camera.  As soon as you have been using two cameras to record the same event, this becomes nothing but annoying.  Ideally, what you'd like to be able to do is just sync the two videos and then cut back and forth, but this is not possible with only the one source track.  It becomes an arduous process of making the entire show out of my B roll (which has the cleanest audio and a broad view of the lecture) and then splicing in the talking-head and slides from the A roll.  The problem is, now I have to manually sync every single insert (this workload will probably be lowered with some math and one good initial sync).

...on to the hunt for a new piece of editing software...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gotta remember, iMovie (like the inferior Windows Movie Maker (Which I've used eough to know its suckiness)are for the casual user. I agree, 2 video editing in iMovie sucks. Go get Final Kill Pro (as the ninja calls it) or whatever. I use (so far) Adobe Premiere 6.5 on Windows for heavy editing, but to throw something together really quickly, when I don't have to do multiple cams and uber fancy stuff... iMovie works fine.

Scott said...

UPDATE: Okay, it sucks even more now. How about some ability to do math with timecodes? Or, even more basic, why can't a trim a clip by typing-in offsets (or, why am I forced to used a mouse for almost everything)? Stupid, stupid program.

Scott said...

UPDATE #2: ...and now iMovie just crashed and I lost 22 finished minutes...probably 1.25 hours worth of work...stupid iMovie. I'm becoming a final-cut user...effective my next project.

Anonymous said...

Sad thing is, iMovie is by far the most stable editing software I've used...