How Apple's iMovie made me a Spielberg--in just one hour

AnchorDesk

How Apple's iMovie made me a Spielberg--in just one hour

David Coursey
Executive Editor, AnchorDesk
Wednesday, March 20, 2002

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As I've already told you, if you're buying a computer mostly to do digital photography, buy a Mac. Well, here's another recommendation, based on my own recent hands-on efforts: If you're buying a computer to make digital home movies, buy a Mac.

Both Windows XP and Mac OS X include video-editing apps. Apple's iMovie stands up as a powerful, full-fledged application. By comparison, XP's Windows Movie Maker comes off as an afterthought.

YES, THERE ARE commercial Windows video editors simple enough for home users. Over the next few weeks I'll be testing a few of them. But iMovie represents the same remarkable combination that has kept Macintosh in business since 1984: It's powerful and it's easy to use. And better yet, it's free with every new Mac.

Using iMovie, I turned 20 minutes of raw video into a snappy presentation just under six minutes long. My mini-masterpiece includes 11 edits, eight transitions, a fade-in with titles at the beginning, and a fade-out with credits at the end. And all this took about an hour to create--the very first time I ever used the program.

Regular AnchorDesk readers will remember that last week we bid farewell to our colleague, C.C. Holland, who left us to go write a novel. On Thursday, we had a going-away party. Since I don't have kids, this is about as close as I get to a Kodak moment. So I brought along a Canon ZR25 MC digital video camcorder to preserve the event for C.C.'s keepsake file.

AT LEAST, that's what I told everyone. The real reason was to collect some raw material for this column (the next-to-last in my "Month with Mac" series).

Home from the party, I connected the camcorder to the iMac using a FireWire cable. FireWire is so fast (400 Mbps, which feels like the speed of light compared with USB 1.1 connections) that you can capture video on the computer directly from the camera in real time.

The iMovie application allows you to control the camcorder directly from the iMac--a real help when deciding which sequences to include. As I played the video from the camcorder into iMovie, I was able to fast-forward or rewind as necessary and then hit the "import" button to capture the video as an iMovie clip. Each time I did this, iMovie added a thumbnail of the clip to the on-screen window.

ONCE I'D IMPORTED all the clips I wanted, I sequenced them by dragging and dropping their thumbnails along a time line.

Note that I'd gotten this far without reading any documentation or watching the video tutorial. But once I'd assembled the clips in the correct order on the time line, I couldn't figure out how to trim away the bits I didn't want. Turns out it's easy, and the online help file showed me how.

Pretty soon, I had the video edited down just the way I wanted it. But the final product still looked jerky. So, again dragging and dropping, I added transitions--wipes, dissolves, fades--to the edit points. Adding titles was just as easy. I could have added video and audio effects and narration the same way, but chose not to.

WHEN I WAS FINISHED, I saved the file. First, I saved it as a 6MB QuickTime suitable for e-mailing to C.C. That took about 6 minutes.

Saving it as a DVD-quality file took the better part of an hour. I am not sure of the exact time, however, because after checking my e-mail and sending C.C. the QuickTime file, I walked away from the computer.

When I came back, the DVD file had been created, and I was ready to use another Apple application--iDVD, free with all Macs that include a DVD burner--to burn it onto a disk. The software allows you to create a professional-looking disc that can be shown on most home DVD players and on PCs equipped with DVD-ROM drives.

AT THE END of the project, I have a QuickTime movie file consisting of my C.C. moment and a DVD to send her as a farewell gift. Lacking extra lighting and a better microphone (along with a sound mixer and other goodies), my iMovie is by no means professional in quality. But it's way, way better than all those home movies my parents took. The 90 minutes it took me to shoot and assemble was time well spent.

I'd like to tell you how to do all this on a Windows XP machine, but I can't. Windows Movie Maker just doesn't do what iMovie does. Together, iMovie and iDVD allowed me to share my world in a way I'd never tried before. The various Windows systems I've seen were just too complex.

Which is why I say, if you want to make home--or even simple business--movies, you need a Mac.

Have you tried other video-editing applications? How do they stack up? Are any of them better than iMovie? What? Why? TalkBack to me, and take my QuickPoll below!

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