Apple iMovie isn’t the simplest video editing application; that honor now goes to Windows Live Movie Maker. But iMovie combines simplicity with more powerful tools, surpassing Microsoft’s Windows 7-and-Vista-only app with features like image stabilization, voiceover recording, and overlays (think picture-in-picture or green-screen effects). The latest version of our Editor’s Choice-winning entry-level movie editor for Mac is mostly an incremental update, but it adds some impressive new tricks: Hollywood-style trailer creation and audio adjustments top the list of what’s new. Some new effects like slow motion and instant replay have become easy to add. And iMovie ’11 even has something I haven’t seen in an entry-level video-editing program—face detection.

Best Microsoft MCTS Training – Microsoft MCITP Certification at Certkingdom.com

I tested iMovie on a 2.4GHz MacBook with 2GB RAM and a 1.4GHz MacBook Air (11-inch). Installing iMovie is part of the iLife ’11 installation, which is no minor update and isn’t just a matter of dragging a disk image to the applications folder. This makes sense, since it’s multiple applications: On my 2.4GHz MacBook, it took a solid 20 minutes. You can’t install iMovie separately, but if you don’t want the other apps it includes, you can remove them individually later. Even the first time, iMovie started up much faster than Adobe Premiere Elements for Mac on the same MacBook.

When you go to add video files to iLife ’11, it optimizes them at import, which can slow things down, but you can turn off optimization before you start the import. When I imported from using a USB stick with a mixed bag of standard and high def content, about 45 files in all, the program told me that it would take 4 hours. And unfortunately there’s no Cancel button for this process, so I had to Force Quit. The problem turned out to be some preprocessed video file formatting—iMovie only wants to work with actual content from camcorders and cameras. In Windows Live Movie Maker, the same process offered a cancel button, and it even showed thumbnails of the content being imported. It also took less than five minutes. Adobe Premiere Elements 9 for Mac had no trouble importing these files, but that app takes a lot longer to load than iMovie, and crashed a couple times during my testing.

I was also disappointed with the limited selection of video-capable digital still cameras that iMovie directly supported; on Apple’s webpage dedicated to showing which models and formats were supported, only one Canon DSLR with one format was listed, the EOS 5D Mark II and AVCHD. When I plugged in a 7D, nothing. For supported camcorders like the Flip line, the import experience was excellent, showing thumbnails of all the movies on the device and letting me play them for a preview even before the import. I could also drag clips from a Finder folder to iMovie, but only to an Event, not to the source clip area.

Tagging and star-rating clips has been around for while, but having the app analyze your imported video clips for People is a new feat of iMovie ’11; 20 clips totaling 6 minutes took 10 minutes to analyze. Once this was done, I could see a purple line going through the parts of clips containing people, and a tooltip showing whether it was one, two or a group of people. At the bottom of the app’s window, I could click on an silhouette icon to restrict the Event area to just clips containing humans—a helpful tool, which is also found in Premiere Elements, but not in Windows Live Movie Maker.

Interface
With iMovie, Apple invented a new and now much-copied video editing metaphor, and this interface remains in the ’11 version. It intuitively combines storyboard and timeline view. At first, this may throw people used to working in a standard timeline. The app also has a few interface quirks, but after a little experience, using it becomes second nature. Passing the mouse cursor over any clip either in the source or production areas plays that part of the clip or movie. You can swap the Events (source clips) with the Project view from the default Project in the top panel, with a neat animation that shows what’s going where.

When you drag the mouse across a clip’s storyboard entry, which corresponds to its length, the section is encircled with a yellow selection box, and you can add just that selected section to the project. I do wish it were a little easier to select a whole clip in the source—a double click opens the Inspector, which shows duration any applied effects (like stabilization); you can choose to select the whole clip from a right-click context menu choice. Unfortunately, iMovie doesn’t get the full screen view new to iPhoto ’11, which would be a definite advantage in the screen-hungry activity of video editing.

Full-Fledged Hollywood-style Trailers
Version ’11’s canned movie themes go way beyond ’09’s six, including trailer formats that set your home movies to grandiose symphonic background music. Also new are a couple sports-centric instant movie options. When I chose a Movie Trailer theme such as Action, Adventure, Noir, or Blockbuster, I was presented with three pro-studio-style tabs for the production—Outline (and a yellow pad with handwriting font), Storyboard, and Shot list. The first let me enter the cast and crew, and the Storyboard and Shot List tabs are where you enter clips for use in the trailer.

The storyboard and shot list tabs are where the magic happens: They both show thumbnails of types of clip required to complete the trailer—action, group shot, close-up, and so on. In the Storyboard, they’re arranged chronologically, and in the Shot List by type. You can’t change the duration of these, since they’re timed to sync with the background music, and the program will adjust your chosen clip or clip section to the correct length if it isn’t already. The result is a high-definition movie trailer sequence perfectly timed with an exciting music score performed by no less than the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s even easier to make than this writeup makes it sound, and you can always go back and change any clips or text.