Working with iMovie 08
By S Simmons. Filed in Editing |
I’ve written a couple of posts over at Studio Daily about Apple’s new iMovie 08 and how I was impressed with its new way of thinking about live skimming your video clips and selecting video for the edit. Others haven’t been as impressed. Whatever ones opinion on iMovie 08 it has completely changed from previous versions. If you are unfamiliar with the new app, click over the Apple’s site and read about the changes as well as view a few video tutorials. It’s very simple in concept (much more simple that iMovie 06) and easy to use. It’s so quick, simple and easy to use that I have (and I never thought I would say this) used it recently on a few personal edits. I slammed some clips together and exported them for loading on my iPhone quicker that I could have ever done it in Final Cut Pro. Why is this?
It’s the concept of skimming. When you import any video clip into iMovie 08 it creates a tiny 120×90 thumbnail of your clip that the app uses for skimming:
as you mouse over imported clips in the library you see a real-time thumbnail preview in the library as you skim across. I say “skim” across as you don’t have to click and drag. I can’t say how nice it is to not have to click and drag to shuttle around a clip. One less repetitive movement while editing, times the hundreds or thousands of times you might do it in an edit, and this is a real time saver. It would be great to see some type of this option implemented in Final Cut Pro. When you do click and drag in the library thumbnails you get a selection:
drag that selection up into the edit window and you begin to build your edit. I think Apple calls these windows events and projects but it really is a library (or bin) and a type of timeline. Gone is the traditional timeline. Once you drag a few clips to make an edit you then get what resembles a timeline, complete with little icons for transitions:
Steve Jobs mentioned in his presentation that you can keep media on a firewire drive. While this is true I was very disappointed to see that whenever I imported media already on a drive, iMovie preceded to copy that media into a new place that I specified and generate the tiny thumbnails. This was a disappointment as the media was already in a perfectly fine place on my external drive. You do have the option of moving a specific file instead of copying but again, why if it already exists in a good place. Apple is marketing iMovie 08 as a way to catalog all your video so it seems like it could just leave it where it originates from if you are importing existing video and just point to that location. It did leave my video from a point and shoot in the iPhoto directory … so who knows why it does what it does. Once video has been used in an edit you get a nice orange marker to show you what has been used:
But what about using iMovie 08 in a real production environment? There is a little feature under the share menu called Export Final Cut XML:
Kinda strange that the left off the “Pro” part as that is part of the name of the app. This does make some integration possible. After making an edit in the iMovie 08 “timeline” just choose this export option. You are presented with a dialog box telling you what you will and won’t get:
You certainly don’t get everything that a real XML can handle but you do get enough to make it at least useful. Most importantly you seem to get the reel names and the timecode that was assigned to the imported (read: imported, as in clips that were captured properly in Final Cut Pro) Quicktime clips:
That’s all you need to make an edit. I can see the editor capturing all the footage for a given job, taking a client’s firewire drive and copying the hours and hours of talking head interviews over to that drive (that you have properly captured), having them pick selects or string out a rough radio edit and give you an XML of their work. Import that XML into FCP, reconnect the media and you have what could be a useful tool and much time saved. Why do I say see the editor capturing instead of letting the client (or an assistant) capture in iMovie 08? When capturing in iMovie 08 you don’t get to name specific reels nor does it take in proper timecode. When you import an XML you can drag your iMovie captured clips into the bin and see the disappointment, no reel and zero hour timecode:
Besides, iMovie (still) imports clips as a dv stream. Not optimal for FCP as some rendering will be required depending on your machine:
If you were to implement this idea on a real job, do a test with the client as well as an exported XML file before relying on it as a guaranteed workflow. As always, you should test out new ideas and new workflows in the edit suite before implementing them on a real job. There are some other apps out there that allow similar workflows as well; iDive and Frameline 47 come to mind. But for ease of creating a down and dirty rough edit I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as easy as iMovie 08. Now that’s a statement I never though I would say!
Tuesday, August 28th 2007 at 11:38 am
Very cool indeed! The only annoying thing is that iMovie insists on converting the captures and copying them in the process. If it wouldn’t do that it would be perfect. Thanks for figuring this out. I talk about this with Apple Support and they CS rep I talked to wasn’t aware of this.
Friday, August 31st 2007 at 6:19 am
As you can see in the timeline picture shown above there is only ons audio track. I suppose you did the recording in stereo and expect two audio tracks in FCE. I tryed this on my system and also noticed that one of the stereo tracks is missing.
Sunday, September 2nd 2007 at 4:07 am
The screen shots are very deceptive and hide a lot of iMovie ’08′s many features. You can indeed have more than one audio track (and I believe you’re looking at the Final Cut screen shot anyway), and actually, ’08 is more powerful than ’06 in that you can have multiple audio tracks *and* a background audio track. You can even “extract” audio from a clip in your library by command-shift dragging it to your “timeline.”
Sunday, September 2nd 2007 at 4:11 am
BTW, when I said “…multiple audio tracks *and* a background audio…” I meant you can have, say, six audio tracks all in addition to the background audio versus being limited to two tracks plus background audio in ’06.
Sunday, September 2nd 2007 at 7:35 am
Tom, I think you need to elaborate a bit on your comment and how the screen shots are deceptive. They are of exactly what I am talking about in the post. If you look you see that the Final Cut Pro screen shot is illustrating something in FCP not iMovie.
Sunday, September 2nd 2007 at 10:24 am
Sorry, I confused myself: I’ve been reading a lot of trash about the new iMovie and a not-careful-enough reading of your post conflated those with yours. The first thing I said about deceptive screen shots was not meant about yours, but meant about screen shots of iMovie ’08 in general: it’s hard to tell from looking at the main window that there are a lot of features people think are missing from ’06, as many on the web have done. I thought the second comment (from William) was referring to one audio track–the background, video audio–from the iMovie shot, and subsequently only one audio showing up in the FC shot. The example I had in mind about screenshots not showing power is multiple audio tracks – not having the blank space set aside for audio tracks as ’06 & FC have, people (again generally) have assumed there’s no support for them.
In the end, I’m guilty of the same thing (denouncing on the face instead of looking deeper, or reading more carefully) I accuse, and I apologize.
I will say on a slightly different topic, that of organization, re: your comments: I’m disappointed not to see the command-option-drag feature that iTunes has in order to add something to the library without moving or copying it (the same shortcut as to create an alias in the Finder), for when you want to work on a video without necessarily adding it to your body of clips, and the iTunes option of having the program not manage your library (which I don’t use, but might appreciate in iMovie).
Tuesday, October 2nd 2007 at 8:47 am
When you say, “It’s so quick, simple and easy to use” are you purposely leaving out the part where it takes over 240 minutes to generate thumbnails when importing an 11 minute 48 second mp4 movie, leaving iMovie completely unusable while that is taking place?
I’ll let you know how simple and easy the new program is in about 4 hours…
Wednesday, October 3rd 2007 at 8:37 am
Todd, I did not purposely leave that out. The in/out time is something that happens in all NLEs, pro or consumer. I would think you should research that further as that certainly isn’t the norm. I’ve had no such problems with anything I’ve tried to import. My guess would be that it has something to do with importing an mp4. mp4′s aren’t an edit format but a delivery format… must not be easy to convert. Why were you trying to edit an mp4 in the first place?
Thursday, October 4th 2007 at 8:28 pm
I have Final Cut Pro and iMovie ’08. And actually I like iMovie (except not being about to use the i/o shortcuts for In and Out points, which I desperately hope they add in a .x iteration. That said, what I like is the user friendly interface. To be honest, I was hoping that the new Final Cut would sport a friendly look. I’m not that old and I have good eye sight, but even I have trouble with the ever shrinking iconography.
What I am trying to figure out is a workflow for the prosumer. Do I need to capture in FCP, then import to iMovie as my media browser. I would prefer iMovie over the thumbnailed bins in FCP. When I work on something, I can either do it solely in iMovie for simple projects or export FCP XML for more complex work.
I could really use a pros advice. I’m a father with limited time on my hands and am struggling to keep up. I have a large library of dance footage that I want to work with. Admittedly the features are not all there, but I like iMovie’s feel. But I killed myself converting footage to MPEG-2 and I’m not sure that was a wise idea. Any advice would be appreciated.
Friday, October 5th 2007 at 11:11 am
Thanks for all the helpful posts. My question is similar to cfasca’s above – can you import FCP projects into iMovie ’08? Frankly I do not know how to use iMovie and with limited time would prefer to stick to FCP. However, I REALLY LIKE the new .mac web gallery and desire to upload my FCP projects to my .mac web gallery. The only method I can find to upload movies (not “photo movies”) in web gallery is to upload directly from iMovie ’08. So, I’m thinking I need to import my FCP to iMovie then upload to web gallery. Is there another way to get FCP projects to the web gallery – full movies, not the “tiny” or “mobile” versions that you can use in the photo section of the web gallery? Thank you.
Monday, October 8th 2007 at 10:19 am
You can’t bring a full FCP project into iMovie per se… the workflow I would use is to capture in FCP and then bring those master clips into iMovie. And edits made there can be reflected in an XML and then reconnected in FCP. They are totally separate apps so integration is minimal but it can work. I’m sure you could export a self-contained Quicktime, import that into iMovie and use that functionality to upload to the net….
Monday, October 8th 2007 at 10:46 am
Thanks. It did work. I exported a .dv file from FCP and imported it to iMovie, then uploaded to .mac web galler. Worked fine.
Monday, October 8th 2007 at 11:46 am
Cool. and you know you really don’t ever have to make a dv stream (a .dv file) to do any of this stuff. If it’s captured natively as a quicktime (.mov using the DV NTSC codec) you can leave it at that.
Monday, October 29th 2007 at 11:46 am
As a PC user who was advised to change to Apple Mac because of its easy and stable movie editing iMovie program, I am totally perplexed by the discussions above. I need a timeline for my editing when I produce a movie. I also need at least two sound channels for voice overs and two picture channels for layers and effects. I have many .avi files of an hour each that I want to edit and then combine all the edited files into say one 45 minute movie. Maybe with Boot Camp (on OS 10.5 Leopard) I could use something like Adobe Premiere, having booted up the Mac into a Windows XP environment for producing my movie to copy onto a DVD. I wish to make many DVD copies of my final productions. Maybe I should stay with my PC after all and get Vista. I’d appreciate any guidance that anyone can give.
Monday, October 29th 2007 at 12:03 pm
PeterE;
It’s important to understand that iMovie 08 is a totally new way in thinking of video editing. A non-timeline based approach. I would advise searching out tutorials and giving it a chance as it is different but in a good way. Throw out your old way of thinking and it might work.
If not then seek out Final Cut Express for the old timeline, video tracks and audio tracks way of thinking. Or download iMovie 06 for free from apple’s site:
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/imovieHD6.html
it’s there for those that just can’t wrap their heads around iMovie 08 and want to move back to the other version.
Saturday, February 9th 2008 at 5:28 am
Im wondering how friendly iMovie can be in term of importing any different video format…
What exactly are the video file format that iMovie08 can support?
Thank you…