I Heart iMovie: Why Apple's iMovie HD Beats Windows XP Movie Maker 2
Date: Aug 19, 2005
Preparing to embark on a vacation to Alaska, my wife and I decided at the last minute to buy a digital camcorder and dive headlong into the world of video. We were bound for Alaska, after all—land of abundant wildlife, calving glaciers, and near-perpetual daylight at certain times of the year. The only video I'd shot previously was at my cousin's wedding years earlier, using my father's antiquated, bulky VHS recorder. This new camcorder fit into one hand. How things had changed!
Two weeks and six full MiniDV tapes later, I sat down at my PowerBook G4 and fired up a little application that I'd previously launched only once: iMovie. In less than two hours—without any instruction—I'd imported some footage, edited it, added titles and music, and uploaded a one-minute short to a web page for family and friends to view.
Whether you're shooting vacation highlights, sporting events, or the school play, iMovie gives you the capability to turn that footage into something your friends and family will want to watch. Best of all, iMovie is easy and fun to use. You don't need to be a professional to operate it: iMovie is used by school kids, moms and dads, and aspiring filmmakers alike. You can jump right in without knowing a thing about video.
Importing Footage: Direct to Mac
Most consumer camcorders record footage to MiniDV tape, due to the immense amount of data video required. To get that footage onto your computer, you connect a cable to the camera's 1394 port, a high-speed data transfer technology Apple invented and refers to by the less-geeky name FireWire. Unlike many Windows PCs, every Macintosh sold since 2001 includes at least one FireWire port. When you connect a camcorder, turn it on, and launch iMovie, the Mac recognizes the camera model and puts you into iMovie's import mode. Moving the video from the camera to the Mac's hard drive is as simple as pressing a single Import button.
Professional video editing applications require you to manually review the footage and set markers that identify where each clip begins and ends. By contrast, iMovie does that work for you: As video is saved to the hard disk, iMovie automatically creates individual clips based on when you started and stopped recording (see Figure 1). The end result is a collection of discrete video clips ready to be edited, rather than one large video chunk.
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Figure 1 Clips created while importing.
The latest version, iMovie HD, imports more than just the common-variety standard definition (SD) digital video. If you have access to one of the newer high-definition video (HDV) cameras, such as Sony's $3,500 HDR-FX1, you can bring that high-resolution footage directly into iMovie for editing. Previously, editing HD required tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment.
In addition to SD and HDV formats, iMovie HD can import MPEG-4 video from newer tapeless camcorders that record directly to memory cards, as well as from Apple's iSight videocamera.
Best of all, you can mix and match these formats in your movies. Did you shoot some of your vacation using a MiniDV camcorder, and some of it using a separate MPEG-4 camcorder? Or maybe you used your digital still camera's movie mode to capture some video? Perhaps you shot some scenes with your camera's 16:9 (widescreen) feature enabled, and others in the regular 4:3 aspect ratio? iMovie handles it all, and adjusts the video to fit. For example, bringing 16:9 footage into a 4:3 project automatically letterboxes the 16:9 footage, so you can capture the full expanse of that last night's sunset. Or import HDV footage into an SD project, and the image will be resampled to fit the lower-resolution SD format.
Editing: You Don't Need to Be a Pro
Now that your footage lives on your hard drive, it's time to start editing. To build a movie, simply drag your clips, which are collected at the right side of the window, to the Timeline at the bottom. Because the clips are all split out individually, you can throw together a "rough cut"—simply position the scenes you want, left to right, in the Timeline. This editing style is called nonlinear because you don't have to adhere to the order in which you shot the footage. Did you capture a gorgeous sunrise on the last day of your vacation? Drag it to the beginning of the Timeline to start the movie with a rising dawn.
One aspect of the Timeline that I particularly like is its feedback: When you select a clip and drag it to a new location, the other clips in the Timeline shift politely out of the way, so you know exactly where the clip will end up when you release the mouse button. Each clip also includes a thumbnail image of its first frame, so even if you're working with "Clip 07," you can see what it is (you can also rename clips manually).
Once you've dragged clips to the Timeline, you've created a movie; it's as simple as that. Click the Play button to play the movie in the preview monitor. The Timeline is also malleable; you can rearrange clips at any point in the editing process.
Of course, unless you're a super-disciplined photographer, you won't want all of the footage in the Timeline, which is where iMovie's powerful clip-editing features come into play. iMovie 4 and later versions employ a technique that Apple calls direct trimming, a visual method of removing the frames you don't want to keep. Let's say you're working with a clip of a winning soccer goal that's 10 seconds in length, but you want only 5 seconds to appear in your finished movie—the important footage is the scoring of the goal itself, not the players walking downfield to regroup. In the Timeline (see Figure 2), position the mouse pointer at the right edge of the clip, hold down the mouse button, and drag to the left. The preview in the monitor displays the current frame corresponding to the mouse pointer's position. Continue dragging until you reach the frame that will be the last one in the clip—the five-second mark in this example—and then release the mouse button.
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Figure 2 Direct trimming: Select the clip to edit (top), position the mouse pointer at the right edge of the clip (middle), and then drag to hide frames you don't want to display (bottom).
Now, suppose you realize later that the cut you made is too abrupt, and you want to restore some of that footage of the players walking after the goal. The frames you deleted using direct trimming aren't gone—they're only hidden. Click and drag the edge of the clip to the right to expose the footage you want. With this nondestructive editing, you won't accidentally throw away footage that you might need later.
Direct trimming is the most visually intuitive method of editing, but you can also position the playhead at a point within a clip and split it into two clips, or select a range of frames within a clip and either delete those frames or delete the footage that surrounds the selection. In short order, your lengthy rough cut gets trimmed down to a more manageable length.
iMovie also includes an intriguing feature called paste over at playhead, which is handy when you want to retain the existing audio but throw in different video. The best example is a flashback sequence: Suppose that, in our earlier example, the girl who scored the winning soccer goal is being interviewed and reminiscing about what she was thinking during that moment. As she talks, the footage of the event is pasted over the video of her interview, keeping her voice narration and displaying the winning kick. You could accomplish this effect manually, but it would take longer to set up.
The same editing techniques are used for audio. The Timeline features two audio tracks, with which you can add sound effects and music or edit the audio that accompanies the video. (Unfortunately, iMovie doesn't distinguish between stereo tracks when editing.) Visible sound waves on audio clips make it easy to trim a clip to the right moment or isolate unwanted noises and reduce their volume levels (see Figure 3).
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Figure 3 Sound waves on audio clips.
Video Toys: Titles, Transitions, and Effects
The fact that your video clips can be trimmed and organized however you like is a huge improvement over playing back whatever the camera captured. But as an editor, you're going to want more, and iMovie delivers with its array of titles, transitions, and effects.
Gone are the days of setting the video camera so that it burns the date and time onto all of its footage—that's a great feature for FBI surveillance videos, but a distraction for everything else. iMovie's built-in titles let you use any font installed on your Mac and place text onscreen using a variety of animated effects, from a simple centered title to 3D spins to a Star Wars-style crawl into the distance. Simply type the text; choose a font, size, and color; and then drag the title where you want it to appear in the Timeline.
iMovie's transitions go a long way toward adding a professional feel to movies. Although you'll probably want to stick with something subtle such as Cross Dissolve, which blends one clip into the other, you can opt for flashier effects such as twirling one video clip into the middle of the screen or disappearing into a circle (see Figure 4). Again, as with titles, transitions are applied by simply dragging them to the Timeline (see Figure 5).
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Figure 4 The Circle Closing transition.
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Figure 5 Add a transition by dragging it to the Timeline.
As for effects, you can manipulate video in many ways: set clips to black-and-white, add noise and grain to replicate the look of aged film, adjust color balance, and more. Plenty of experimentation is available for the editor who's looking for something different.
The most exciting thing about these toys is that they're not the exclusive domain of Apple's iMovie development team. Third-party companies have taken iMovie's extensibility and run with it, creating a mini industry of plug-ins. At first, these were collections of more transitions and effects: If you needed one scene to blend into the next by zooming in on the shape of a heart, a plug-in was your solution.
However, plug-ins now add features that Apple never intended to put into the program: picture-in-picture scenes; green-screen matte removal; and one of my favorites, image stabilizers that reduce camera shake. (You can find links to many of these developers at my iMovie Visual QuickStart Guide site.) More powerful (and more expensive) video editing programs such as Final Cut Pro include these features out of the box (and sometimes do a better job), but those cost $1,000 versus around $30 for an iMovie plug-in package.
iLife: iMovie's Secret Weapon
In one area, it's almost unfair to compare iMovie with other consumer video editing applications. Although iMovie HD stands alone, it's also part of the $70 iLife '05 package, which also includes iTunes 4, iDVD 5, iPhoto 5, and GarageBand 2. (iLife is free on all new Mac models, so you may not have to buy it separately if you've recently purchased an Apple computer.) More than just a bundle, iLife gives iMovie a significant leg up.
The programs are all designed to work together, so the digital photos you store in iPhoto can be viewed and imported from within iMovie (see Figure 6). The same goes for songs in your iTunes library. For photos, iMovie includes a nifty feature called the Ken Burns Effect, a more colorful name for what most video editors refer to as pan-and-zoom. The Ken Burns Effect (which sounds like a 1970s band name to me) adds motion to a digital photo by giving the appearance that the camera is traveling over its surface, a technique used to great effect in filmmaker Ken Burns' documentaries.
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Figure 6 Import photos from iPhoto.
The iLife suite gives you the capability to create all aspects of the video. In addition to shooting the footage, you can compose and perform music in GarageBand (or create music loops by combining the thousands of prerecorded samples included with the program), export the soundtrack to iTunes, and drag it from iMovie's Audio pane to the Timeline. When you're done editing, you can set DVD chapter markers within iMovie and then click a button to package the whole thing and send it to iDVD to create a DVD that will play in nearly every consumer DVD player.
Sharing: Your Own Distribution Deal
Editing gets most of the ink when writing about iMovie, but I can't leave before mentioning the other side of creating a video: getting it out of iMovie, off your computer, and to the outside world. In addition to having the option to create a DVD of your project, iMovie offers a few methods of exporting the video.
Just as you imported footage from a camera via FireWire, you can export it back to the camera onto a blank MiniDV tape. The advantage is that you don't lose any video quality, and you can then hook the camcorder to a television for playback. For HD video, sending it back to the camera is currently the only way to play the high-definition version on an HDTV; there's still no accepted format for high-def DVDs.
You can also export the movie as a QuickTime file that can be played on any QuickTime-capable computer (Mac or Windows). iMovie has a handful of prefab settings for exporting to CDs, the web, and email, each of which is geared to the medium by employing different image sizes and compression levels (see Figure 7). Of course, you can also go in and configure the export settings if you know what you're doing.
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Figure 7 The QuickTime Share dialog box.
One advantage to this approach is that you can take advantage of H.264, an emerging video compression standard that creates impressively high-quality video footage with relatively small file sizes. (H.264 is a key component of the two competing formats for high-definition DVDs.) H.264 is also very scalable, capable of running on HD televisions as well as cell phones.
If you don't care to become an expert in QuickTime encoding and just want to post your movies online for other people to see, that's fine, too. iMovie has sharing presets that will encode the video and automatically upload it to your .Mac HomePage (if you have a .Mac subscription) or generate email with the movie as an attachment. You can even create a version that's optimized for cell phones that support the 3GPP format, and iMovie will transfer it to a phone via Bluetooth wireless networking.
iMovie: Easy and Fun
The introduction of iMovie 1.0 was a bona fide "aha" moment. Gone were the days of long, choppy videotape recordings, replaced by the capability for any average user to accomplish on his or her Mac what previously required thousands of dollars of equipment and years of specialized training. iMovie HD is as easy to use as ever, and is the first consumer-level editing program to support the nascent field of editing HD footage. How things have changed!
Jeff Carlson is the author of iMovie HD & iDVD 5 for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide (Peachpit, 2005, ISBN 0321335422) and Managing Editor of TidBITS. He lives in Seattle, where the weather is often conducive to editing video indoors.