iMovie

[The Brez Man]

I plan to buy this for the iPad since it's only $4.99. If you have it and used it, share your impressions (and your videos!). I've already seen some really good movie trailers it can make.

UPDATE: I did buy it and made a trailer for an upcoming vacation video in about 30 minutes. Very easy process and I thought it turned out pretty good.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_293HX8JllI

[The Brez Man]

Well, I created my first project in iMovie last night. Running time was just a tad over 28 minutes, which I thought was really pretty good, considering it was a week’s worth of videos and photos (of course I didn’t use everything I shot.)

Some observations about this process:

• Overall it’s a pretty seamless process. I think it would have been neat to have some sort of template to keep things as tidy as the Trailer with the option to either use that template or do it freeform the way it is.
• Disappointed that the Themes didn’t have a preview or demo to show what they were, had to learn by trial and error.
• Disappointed that there wasn’t any transition options other than Crossfade or choosing a Theme’s 1 transition.
• Disappointed there weren’t more options for putting text on the screen (placement mainly) and wished you could put a duration on it instead of having to cut the clip when you wanted it to end.
• Really liked the clip edit that allows you to go frame by frame and slice a clip or isolate a section (by slicing both ends) and then deleting it.
• Liked the Sound FX that you can add
• Liked that you can adjust the volume level (or mute) each clip.
• I really didn’t do anything with adding any other audio tracks (like music) as background music. Most of my project was video and with the exception of a couple of clips where you could really hear the annoying sound of wind on the microphone (I muted those), I let the video’s audio speak for itself. It might have been nice to have a few small looping clips of music to have when I had photos or when I muted, and maybe I’ll play around with that a little more.
• Used Intro Designer to create a Title Page Animation as a lead-in
• Wished there was a Credits section (like in Trailer). There’s a .99 app that allows you to create scrolling credits for iMovie, so I may splurge and buy that.
• The app bombed out back to the iPad desktop 2 or 3 times, but it didn’t lose any of my work.

I may have not done some things correctly or just didn’t look in the right place for some of the things I mentioned.

I did run into a problem when I was finished. I told it to Export to my camera roll and it asked which resolution I wanted. 1080p must be incredibly huge because it said I didn’t have enough room for that before it even started. So then I chose 720p and while it rendered the project (I can now watch the project completely from the main screen instead of in the building window), it chugged on for about a half hour and then told me there wasn’t enough room to save it to the camera roll. I had over 9gb of memory left before I started the rendering process, so I’m going to have to figure out how to free up more room on the iPad (it’s only a 16 gb). The whole point was to get this to the camera roll so I could then copy it to the computer and then burn it to a DVD. I’m assuming what it’s done is it has all of my source files, then copies of those source files in the ‘project’, then it rendered the movie, then it needs to copy that rendering to the camera roll, meaning that’s the likely reason why I only have 2gb left on the iPad now.

[jecwobble]

I think you you're right about the memory/file issue. That goes back to my complaint about iOS file management. They try to make it simple for the user, at the expense of storage resources--original files sotred in app, copied to another app, exported to a third app. That makes for three times the storage space, all at full resolution--1080p.

I think the idea behind iMovie for iPad is to make short, fast paced videos to share online. If your goal is to burn longer videos to DVD, you're going to move to a traditional computer at some point anyway, so you may as well use a more powerful desktop app to edit your footage anyway.

[The Brez Man]

Shhh....It's my bargining chip to get a 64gb iPad for myself...