This weekend I’ve had my first opportunity to use iMovie. I jumped at the chance, to tell the truth; video-editting is a hobby that I cultivated for a couple of years when I was Down South and that I haven’t had an opportunity to indulge since. Also helping a friend out of a tight spot, which never hurts.
My main complaint about iMovie is how it handles the logistics of video clips. The basic layout is that you’ve got the timeline (which represents the sequence of clips in the finished product), and you’ve got an album of clips you haven’t (yet) used. To use a clip, you drag it from the album to the timeline. If you decide that you don’t want to use a clip in the timeline… well, you can’t drag it back to the album, or at least there’s no intuitively obvious way to do it. (And enough else about the program is intuitive that I’m suspecting that there is really no way to do it.) So you delete it instead.
And, if you’re really indecisive and decide later that you wanted that clip after all… or if you just wanted to move it to an as-yet-uncreated segment of video and don’t want it cluttering up your timeline… well, you’re out of luck at that point. You can only get things out of the iMovie Trash by performing a succession of Undo
s… so STBY if you’ve actually done a lot of complex stuff in the intervening time.
There’s a couple of ways around this, as far as I can tell; I’ve been just cut-and-pasting what I need directly into the timeline, thereby keeping the original, untrimmed footage in the album. It eats up a lot of space, and I’ve never seen Milady Powerbook here run this sluggishly before, but it works.