iMovie '08

If you are unfamiliar with the new app, click over to 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 than 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 do that 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 camera 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 they left off the “Pro” part as that is part of the name of the program. 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 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 thought I would say!

This article was sourced from Scott Simmons’s blog, The Editblog (under permission).