“Apple is touting what it calls the biggest changes to iLife in more than five years. iPhoto gets some nice ease-of-use adjustments; iMovie changes radically from its predecessor; and the most obvious addition to GarageBand is a virtual stage for composing original songs. iDVD offers new themes and customizations as well as professional-level encoding. Overall, this package for editing photos, movies, and music seems to be a great deal, still $79, plus it’s free with the purchase of a new Mac,” Elsa Wenzel reports for CNET Reviews.
“Movie ’08 is a far cry from the ’06 version. It’s built to simplify on-the-fly video editing, but Apple has removed many controls that added depth to the older version. But you can keep both programs on one machine when you install iLife ’08, and you can download iMovie ’06 version 6.0.4 for free,” Wenzel reports.
“We’re not crazy about iMovie’s new split personality, with features removed from the new version in the name of simplification,” Wenzel reports.
“We wish the altered interface could have retained more features from iMovie ’06, instead of forcing longtime users either to suffer with less functionality or use the old software,” Wenzel reports.
“Newcomers to iLife will find uncluttered interfaces and a well-rounded set of features for managing pictures and making movies, songs, and podcasts,” Wenzel reports. “For those upgrading to iLife ’08 from a prior version, the alterations to iPhoto are the most practical, especially for managing massive picture libraries. Although GarageBand gets more controls, iMovie eliminates many in its upgrade, and users may consider it dumbed down. And Apple seems to be pushing serious video hobbyists away from iMovie and toward Final Cut Express. We wish there were a happy medium.”
Full review covering more of iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, GarageBand, and iWebhere.
MacDailyNews Take: As we’ve been answering in emails all day, we consider iMovie ’08 to be well-suited to the target market (entry-level consumers) and believe that it will help new users to edit videos more quickly and easily. If Apple had not offered iMovie ’06 HD for free to current users, we would have had an entirely different take on iMovie ’08. We understand the reaction to the new iMovie from long-time iMovie users, but we also believe iMovie ’08 has great potential. Current iMovie users lose nothing (they can use iMovie ’06 HD if they wish) and new users gain much in terms of simplicity and speed. We believe iMovie ’08 offers a better, easier way for novices to edit video; making video editing more accessible to more people, which we believe was the original intent of iMovie. iMovie in recent years had become a sort of “Final Cut Express Lite,” which did not address the novice video editor as appropriately as iMovie ’08. Bottom line for iMovie ’08: In general, old users will be mad; new users will be glad.
I am a PC-user that recently switched to the Mac. I originally switched because I felt that the Mac offered a better, higher-quality solution to my needs than the PC could — that is, until now…
I just used iMovie ’08 and here’s my honest opinion:
* My PC’s FREE movie editing software is much more capable.
* iMovie has very few transitions and effects.
* iMovie doesn’t play well with music or sound.
* iMovie has no timeline, so you can’t see how long your movie is.
Honestly, this program should of been called iTube ’08, instead of iMovie. It seems to focus mostly upon sending movies to YouTube (which is in legal trouble and will probably go the way of “Napster” here soon).
I used to be proud to produce movies on my Mac and send them to my friends and family (that use a PC.) It was a form of advertising that shouted — look what I can do with a Mac! …And it works!! I have many of my friends and family that are now strongly considering buying a Mac. They are visiting Apple stores for the first time in their life — but, now I must regret that I will have to inform them that a Apple has intentionally decided to trash its ability to produce quality movies — and now, Microsoft Vista’s movie editing program is a much better decision for home movie makers, that is!
Hmmm, I wonder if the PC guy (in the commercial) will ever point out that the Mac’s iLife has now been neutered — it’s a unix… LOL
@Byron. iTube08. great idea
as for the rest, you still have your copy of iMovie 06? Keep using it, as you are obviously not the target for the new(?) version of iMovie. Not sure who is, but methinks it is a by-product of Goggle/YouTube and Apple pal-iness.
iLife for me is mostly about GarageBand, so I am Ok with the new version
Background: I’ve been an Apple user for 15 years. I am one of the biggest supporters of Apple; you could call me a fanboy if you want, frankly, I don’t care. I have also used iMovie since its creation. There have been few things that Apple has really screwed up in the last 7 years, but this new iMovie ’08 is one of them, and I will explain why.
The previous iMovie was easy to use. I have had numerous people who have never used a Macintosh before, let alone iMovie, come over and edit movies on my iMac using iMovie ’06. Every single one of them picked up iMovie ’06 with minimal assistance and finished their movies in one sitting of 3-4 hours or so. Every single one. You can NOT tell me that iMovie ’06 was difficult to use. If you would have said that 3 weeks ago every single person on this site would have laughed at you and gleefully stated that iMovie ’06 is the easiest to use video editing application on the market, including MDN! Because it was. You cannot tell me that the new iMovie ’08 will be significantly easier to use, because iMovie ’06 was already easy to use as it was!
What made iMovie ’06 great is that it allowed anyone to make professional looking videos, with a minimum of effort and experience. iMovie ’08 allows anyone to make amateurish, YouTube-like, Windows Movie Maker like videos, with a minimum of effort and experience. iMovie ’06 WAS (and still should be) one of the best aspects of the Macintosh, as far as creating things with wow to them, along with iDVD and Keynote. It allowed people (who are not, and do not desire to be video editing professionals) to make professional looking videos. iMovie ’08 does NOT. Make a movie with themes in iMovie ’06 and then make a movie with the same content in iMovie ’08 with the simple titling and transitionary capabilities that it has, and ask people which movie they thought was made on a Mac, and which was made on a PC. Guess what they’ll say. And that is one of the main reasons why Apple has significantly dropped the ball with the new iMovie.
All the people who say that everyone who is complaining should upgrade to FCE are totally missing the point. iMovie comes for free, WITH all new Macs. It is a </b>major, free</b> selling point for the Macintosh platform. Not anymore. It is now a basic, stripped down application that is comparable to many of the editing applications on Windows. Previously, there was no comparison. For shit sake, if I wanted to purchase $300 pieces of software (FCE) right after buying a computer, I would buy a frickin’ Windows PC! This is what Windows people have to do! This is what differentiates the Macintosh from the rest of the market! Open your eyes people!
Finally, what disappoints me most, is that iMovie ’06 will likely never be enhanced in any way anymore, and many of the previous features in iMovie ’06 will not be added to ’08. If they were going to add these features in, why not just offer the basic editing structure of iMovie ’08 (with skimming and such) as an option, and leave all the previous features there? Because they don’t plan on adding them back.
Many previous people who said that iMovie ’08 should be called iMovie Express are dead on correct. iMovie ’06 should remain the actual iMovie in iLife. They should rename iMovie ’08 to be “iMovie Express” and they should offer both, and continue to upgrade both. You know what, they could even take “iMovie” out of iLife, and offer it separately boxed, but still pre-installed on new Macs. I would pay $79 for upgrades to it alone, as well as another $79 for iLife with “iMovie Express” (aka iMovie ’08) in it. But Apple won’t do this, and this move will be seen in many years as a major blow and step backwards to amateur, digital home video editing.
I will continue to use iMovie ’06 until Apple offers a similar product again. If Apple never does, I will use the most similar product I can find to iMovie ’06, and I won’t care what platform it runs on.
–mAc
Okay, I admit it — I’m having a blast with the new iMovie.
I found the old one to be a bit clunky in spots — but the new one is a piece of cake. Much easier to add titles and transitions, as well as keeping related projects together in one place which will make it easy to find everything when I put together the DVDs.
I’m probably the target consumer they were going for — comptuer savvy enough to find my way around, but not a total video geek. For my needs, this will work just fine, thank you…