I’ve finally upgraded to Apple’s iLife 6 package, primarily for the newer version of iMovie.
A short review: iMovie 6 is much quicker than its predecessor’s when it comes to applying transitions and in encoding the finished movie. Titling is better, too: faster, more control, much better previews. I haven’t played with them yet, but a basic set of audio tools has been added.
The downside is that, for me, all of this only works well with DV movie clips. In iMovie 5, I was able to bring in .mov (the QuickTime format) clips and they worked fine. In the new version, trying to work with .mov clips slows the program to a crawl and playback is intermittent. Awful.
Forcing me to go from .mov to DV clips (converted from the .avi files my point-and-shoot produces) is actually a good thing. With iMovie 6 and the DV clips, the program flies along, making it attractive to anyone trying to produce video on the fly or to a tight deadline.
Until today, when I’ve needed a quick edit, I’ve pretty much used QuickTime Pro. Given the improvements, I think I’m going to find myself turning to iMovie more often.
Now, if only Apple would do the unlikely and produce a plugin that allows exporting the edited movie as a Flash video file, I’d be a happy guy.
