While iPhoto delivered a disappointment with the iLife '11 suite, my faith was restored in Apple after taking iMovie for a spin. Again, as with iPhoto, Apple's consumer-grade movie editing app doesn't take any giant leaps forward in this new version but what new features have been added are very welcome. It's a case of no giant leaps but quite a few bounds.
Given that audio is at least as important as the visual content in your movies, the newly-added waveform editing tools fulfil an important function — providing a way to easily manage too-loud portions of your clips, balance levels across multiple clips and easily fade in/out backing music.
This is achieved in typical Apple style, with a click-drag method of choosing segments of waveforms to edit. The colour coding of too-loud audio makes it easy to recognise the waveform that needs a tweak. Excellent stuff. Having recently worked through a 90-minute video in Final Cut Pro managing audio peaks with the time-honoured pen tool, this method clearly has appeal.
People Finder, on the other hand, is one of those Apple ideas that sounds great in theory but left me feeling it's falling short of its promise.
I tried this new feature on a small collection of clips in my project library and the filtering options, based on People Finder's ability to identify clips with one or two people, a group, or a wide shot, failed to work as expected.
When I filtered results for shots with one person, I found several clips with groups, and when filtering for groups, clips without any people. The potential usefulness of filtering using face-detection technology — being able to organise quickly by the types of people shots in your footage — is clear, so here's hoping People Finder earns a little refinement via future updates.
Given that Faces needed some fine-tuning after it was first introduced, it's fair to expect People Finder will become a more effective tool as time goes by. For now, it's not so impressive.
Two other new features, One Step Effects and Sports and News Themes, amount to some new effects tricks and titling capabilities that can easily jazz up a clip but only, as should always be the case with these things, if they are used wisely. If you're detecting a note of indifference, it's because the latter has a US cable TV look about it that may not have broad appeal.
That said, I'm a big fan of the Jump Cut at Beats effect, which applies a series of jump cuts and matches them to the beat markers of your music track. It's a contemporary effect that maintains pace in an edit and will help a lot of movie makers get around those awkward but must-include clips of people doing boring stuff. I imagine those who turn their camera on skateboards, surfers and parkour will put this one to very good use.
I'm sure users will find all the One Step Effects to be useful at some time or another and they are a good example of what Apple does best, which is making tricky procedures simple.
One standout feature that didn't receive much fanfare from Apple is the Rolling Shutter correction tool. I would have overlooked it, too, had it not been brought to my attention by a third party. What this correction tool does is fix the wobbly or bending effect that can be seen in pans using cameras with CMOS sensors, especially DSLRs and other hybrids, and which is most pronounced in low-end video cams such as the "bloggie" cameras that have grown in popularity of late, as well as small sensor digital still cameras such as those in the Lumix series.
There are five strengths that can be applied to correct Rolling Shutter problems, from "None" to "Extra High" and the clip analysis can take some time. You may also need to experiment to find the appropriate correction strength. You'll find this tool at the bottom of the Inspector pane.
There is also a storyboarding tool with a selection of animatics, which I expect could, or should, be put to work by anyone who wants to plan out their video shoots better, especially if they want a documentary feel to their movies.
Also good to see is the attention given to web and social sharing with built-in sharing to Facebook, Vimeo and Podcast Producer on top of the MobileMe and YouTube options already there from the previous version. Those users who fancy themselves as citizen journalists should find the CNN iReport feature a useful addition.
In testing the sharing feature, my YouTube upload succeeded (according to iMovie, anyway) but was nowhere to be found under my account. A Facebook upload was fine, as was a MobileMe upload. However, some full HD footage was sheared during re-processing for the FaceBook upload. Not pretty.
In more general terms, iMovie '11 feels a little rough around the edges. It twice crashed on me when performing a clip analysis and thumbnails were often jittery, for the want of a better way to describe the odd refresh character on mouse rollover.
Let's hope an update or two fixes these because iMovie '11 provides the most compelling reason to upgrade to the iLife '11 suite. Of course, that's not saying much, given there's not a lot in the rest of the suite to get very excited about.
