Whoopsies. Looks like Apple’s brassed off the New York Times’ David Pogue. It seems that the iMovie program included in the new iLife suite is far less impressive than its predecessor, iMovie 6.
There’s no editing timeline, you’re only allowed use of a single audio track for background music, you’re unable to adjust the audio levels should you need to lower the music while someone’s talking, the audio clips fade out automatically with no ability to control or disable said feature, there’s no plug-in support any more, visual effects are absent, and you can’t convert old iMovie projects for use with the new software — to name just a few of Pogue’s quibbles.
“I can’t remember any software company pulling a stunt like this before: throwing away a fully developed, mature, popular program and substituting a bare-bones, differently focused program under the same name.
I’ve used the real iMovie to edit my Times videos for three years now. The results are perfectly convincing as professional video blog work. But the new version is totally unusable for that purpose. It’s unusable, in fact, for anyone doing professional work that requires any degree of precision.”
There are some new useful features, however, such as one-click YouTube uploading, great color correction and frame cropping, and on-the-fly title and crossfade previews. You’re also allowed to download iMovie 6 for free if you own iMovie ’08 and Pogue thinks that Apple will eventually update the new program to include some of the older features.
Apple Takes a Step Back With iMovie ’08 [New York Times]