Oh. My. God. How could Apple do that???
At a first glance, I got excited about iMovie ‘08. In fact, for those who read my blog posts or forum posts on video forums, iMovie is the No1 application I recommend to newbies. But not anymore.
The new version of iMovie, is completely rewritten. While they added some nice features (e.g. AVCHD), they removed some others which are simply too important to be removed. There is no timeline view anymore. There is no iDVD integration anymore. You can’t “see” your audio timeline anymore. There are no chapter markers anymore. Cutting is not precise anymore but a matter of approximation.
It’s like they took iMovie, they added a couple of flashy things, and they made it even more useless as the version of iMovie that was shipping in 2001. I am extremely disappointed by this. The only good thing is, Apple seems to know that their new version sucks, and so owners of iLife ‘08, can download for free the iMovie ‘06 version and install it in parallel (although you will have no AVCHD support with that older version). If you have a G5+ that is, as the new iLife won’t run on G4 computers.
And before you reply about Final Cut Express HD: it is now an old version, and it costs $300. On the PC side equivalent prosumer apps don’t cost more than $130 and they can do more too (e.g. Vegas Movie Studio 8 Platinum does more than Final Cut Express for less than half the price, complete with 24p and some AVCHD support). So either Final Cut Express HD must be both be updated and get a price-cut, or in my book, there is no NLE in the Mac world (except iMovie ‘06) that is useful right now to consumers.
Update: A particularly critical of the new iMovie thread over at Apple’s board was deleted by the admins. Only to see the topic sprang again within minutes. Other topics also show how problematic iMovie ‘08 is.
