iMovie Frustration

Mac
#1

I was using iMovie last night. I have a (very) small YouTube channel & I was wanting to edit a few videos to upload. I remember using iMovie back in the day when it first came out. You could plug in your video camera via Firewire to download all your clips. It was simple, straight forward & easy to use. I used it, along with iDVD, to make a lot of great discs of my kids growing up.

Then, at some stage, someone decided to completely rewrite it & there was a lot of criticism. They must have not had much to do at Apple & were afraid of losing their job or something. I couldn’t believe it really. It’s the old case of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Anyway, last night was just very frustrating. I have to say that iMovie is the most unintuitive, poorly organised, unnecessarily complicated piece of software I have ever used. I had to do over an hour of watching YouTube to find out how to do stuff I wanted to do. And even then some stuff didn’t work properly. Apple should be doing much better than this!

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#2

Yep. I agree.

Studied film n tv at uni, struggle to use iMovie.

#3

What do you use?

I want to start doing a bit more video. I’m going to buy a better video camera soon. I wish Final Cut Pro had a trial version.

#4

I worked as a Digital Content Producer at a commercial radio station for 3 years. When I started, the guy before me was using Adobe Premier. I tried it, wasn’t a fan so moved the station to Final Cut Pro. Quite literally lived in that program for at least 5 hours a workday.

That said, ask me to drive iMovie and I’m lost.

#5

I learned to use Final Cut 5 when I studied film/tv at Griffith in 2006-07. Used FCP7 for a number of years doing videos for my YouTube channel/s after I graduated… But when FCPX came out, I found it very un-intuitive, so stayed with 7 until reaching - was it High Sierra? At which point it was no longer supported.

Around that time anyways I lost my YouTube account due to my own stupidity (10 strikes in 1 night from Warner Bros…), and stopped doing video stuff.

When my wife has wanted me to help her do video presentations, I’ve used whatever version of Imovie I could get to run on whatever machine it was at the time… and they all suck.

#6

I guess they sort of did to Final Cut Pro X what they had already done to iMovie…

#7

Back when FCPX came out, there was a lot of backlash. FCP had been building marketshare steadily (in terms of actual film/tv production), but anecdotally at least there was a lot of people who were not willing to make the shift.

Apparently, FCP has rebuilt that share and now has around 22% of the market, if this is correct:

#8

Like I said before, it would be nice if they had a trial version. I might download the trial version of Adobe Premier & see what that’s like.

#9

I swear they used to do this, and after a quick Google… Final Cut Pro - Free Trial - Apple (AU)

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#10

Thanks for that. I’ll have a look…

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#11

So Apple have announced that they’ll be doing some work on Final Cut in the near future…

#12

After all this video editing chat, getting my own domain, etc etc, I had the urge to recreate my YouTube channel. Just started uploading the other day… But now I’m going to have to learn how to use FCPX so I can make new content. :slight_smile:

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#13

Give the free trial a go. There’s loads of tutorial videos on YouTube.

#14

After doing a lot of learning about setting up etc. I got out this afternoon with my new Sony A7RV and took some video. Just of some local suburban trains at a level crossing. I was experimenting with subject tracking which I worked out pretty quickly and works really well. I took some clips in S-Cinetone profile and one in S-log3. All at 4K but some at 50 fps and some at 25. Playing them back I couldn’t really tell the difference between the frame rates. I reckon iMovie could handle editing the S-Cinetone as it only needs small tweaks to colour balance, saturation and contrast. But the S-log3 is another story. It needs proper colour grading so in the next week or so I’ll download the trial of Final Cut and see how I go with it. There is loads of pretty good info on YouTube.

#15

My TM900 has a number of frame rate options. I know I experimented as well with the difference between 30 and 60fps, but I think from memory perhaps the crap TV I was using didn’t actually allow you to see much difference…

#16

The A7RV is set for PAL & only has 25 or 50 fps available. If you change it to NTFS you get 24, 30 & 60 fps. I don’t know that it makes a lot of difference really. There are 6 or so different codecs & different bit rates available for each codec.

#17

I use the open source KDEnLive for my video editing needs these days. Cross-platform, lightweight, basically is what Adobe Premiere was 25 years ago, which is all I ever needed.

#18

I’m going to download the free trial of Final Cut tomorrow. I thought it was free for 30 days but it’s actually 90 which is bloody good, especially these days.

I’m also going to try some more time lapse videos. I used an app called TLDFlite but I’m going to pay for the full version on the App Store. It does a good job & it’s not overly complicated. Rendering on this Mac Studio is super fast even for Pro Res. Then you can open it in Final Cut if you want to do more editing.

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#19

Have been playing with Final Cut Pro all afternoon/evening. It’s a steep learning curve but I’m getting there slowly. Lots of info on YouTube if you can sort out the good stuff from the crap.

#20

If you get stuck using FCPro jump onto the Apple Discussion Forum for FCPro. Lots of helpful people there who know the program:

Al