“Apple’s iMovie has been around for a long time, and it has always focused on one philosophy: ease of use in a clean and elegant interface. After many years, this hasn’t changed,” Samuel Axon writes for PCWorld. “It’s still a delight to use, if a little bit obtuse at times in its pursuit of minimalism. It lacks some of the formats and features supported in other programs, but what’s there is implemented beautifully.”
“iMovie doubles down on making a very small selection of tools like transitions, backgrounds, titles, voiceover, and basic trimming and editing as straightforward as possible,” Axon writes. “It’s quality over quantity here — which is in stark contrast to many other free applications.”
“iMovie has another advantage over other Mac video editing software: performance. iMovie is very well optimized on modern Macs, and it works very quickly—especially on a MacBook Pro. We had no problems importing, editing, and scrubbing through a 4K video smoothly, where other free editors buckled under the pressure on the same hardware,” Axon writes. “iMovie is free to all new Mac owners, and it’s a great place to start if you want to learn to edit videos, because its basic workflow is similar to that of more sophisticated programs. It would be an unequivocal slam-dunk if it just supported a few more features around the edges.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If you haven’t played around with iMovie on your Mac in awhile, set aside some time and give it a whirl. You might be very pleasantly surprised!
I use iMovie all the time, but the original iMovie, the first one, was a lot more easier to use for many of the basic tools, in fact, it was more precisice at the time of editing audio and video frame by frame.
I will have to disagree with that.
The first iMovie had the traditional user interface of old NLEs (like old FCP, Premiere and similar). Things took more mouse-clicks to accomplish and everything was less intuitive.
The “new” iMovie (almost ten years old at this point), especially the recent versions, is, for me, much faster to use and much more efficient. You can zoom in all the way to cut on individual frames if you wish, and it is an extremely forgiving interface. The best feature of them all is never having to Command+S (remember to save the project). Like FCP X, iMovie remembers every single action you took and commits it to disk.
I agree that the older versions were easier for doing precise cuts, inserts and the like.
It’s the best option for making 30-sec App Store preview videos. You could probably use any editor, but iTunes has a preset for exporting with the correct resolution and other settings required by the App Store.
It the ability to put in chapters again.
Since I upgraded my 2015 MacBook Pro to High Sierra – I can no longer import AVCHD files to iMovie. The video is okay but there is no sound. Up until High Sierra – I had no issues.
Does anyone know what’s up? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I don’t know if this will help but I open my AVCHD movies through Quicktime and then save them to the desktop before importing to iMovie.
For Mac video editing software, besides iMovie, I have also tried Joyoshare video trimmer Mac, Shotcut and Final Cut Pro. Among all of them, I think Joyoshare is the best in operation and lossless cutting. Shotcut is free and open-source. Final Cut Pro is advanced but costly.