[Macworld.com]

In my last entry I took iMovie 4 to task for...well, for its general funkiness. After receiving a comment or two that ran along the lines of "So, what would you do to make it better without turning it into Final Cut for Babies, smart guy?" I thought I'd offer my suggestions here. [more]

[Arne]

Chris,
First of all thank you very much for your Weblogs. I read them all and find them very valuable.
I share your ideas, especially the possibility of downloading filters/ effects directly via a link from a possible Apple Media Store. This way, all those cool stuff would be available in an instand for a much wider range of consumers and nobody would miss it.
So far, it really bothers me that I have to dig quite deep to find this stuff...
Cheers from Tokyo,
arne

[Tau_Myx]

A serious, simple titler:
iMovie's titles are heavy on gaudy nonsense and seriously deficient on what is really important in practical titles. I tried to do a wedding in iMovie once and had to go back to Premiere 4.2 on my old Mac because iMovie couldn't do anything appropriate for a wedding. (Reverent and tasteful.)
I'd like:
1) Drop shadows and outlines! (Black only is fine.)
2) The ability to hold a title on screen for an unlimited amount of time. (Most titles have absurdly short maximums.)
3) The ability to import an Appleworks or TextEdit document with formatting preserved.
4) The ability to pan or scroll around above document as you can with "Ken Burns" photos, while the text is still over video.
5) Fade above titles in and out with control independent of the video below it.
Do these five things, and you could kill everything else in iMovie's titles and have a better, easier-to-use titler.

[Earthling7]

Loved the iMovie + GarageBand = instant soundtrack. That would really be a killer.
What I am puzzled about is the lack of widescreen (16:9) support in iMovie. I have a simple consumer Canon DV camera. It supports anarmorphic widescreen. I have been using it in that mode exclusively for the last year and it's going great with minimal quality loss. I have been editing my holiday videos on a PC and iMovie's lack of support for 16:9 means I'm stuck on the PC for now.
It is not a matter of pro vs. consumer. My Canon is one of the cheaper DV cameras on the market, the freely downloadable Windows Movie Maker supports 16:9. Why not iMovie?

[pcharles]

What is the problem with Cocoa? Is it that Cocoa is slower than Carbon, or that the iMovie engineers do not know how to write fast Cocoa applications? This strikes me as a major issue, because if Cocoa is slower, and it is the future of MacOS, then we can assume all future applications will perform like a sloth.
I recently edited my wedding video on iMovie (about 1:10 with separate soundtrack) and found I was getting into a very extended click and wait forever situation. The Mac and I almost parted ways because it was so frustrating. In the end I emptied the trash (something I had not wanted to do until the end) and iMovie became a lot more snappy. So, tip of the day is back up (duplicate) the project and then empty trash for faster speed. Oh, and what is with the permissions problem in iMovie? Everytime I quite and return, iMovie tells me I do not have permission to use my project. I then have to copy everything to a new folder.
I assume the same problem is true of iPhoto because I have iPhoto with 5000 images, and it is a pain to use on my TiBook 800. The latest update is even worse! It now takes 10 seconds to load and 1 minute to quite, even after I fixed permissions and pared down the database.
Apple is becoming Microsoftian in their programming, I am sure of it! It is OK for Jobs when he demonstrates these applications on their "special" demonstration machines and "Boom" its done, but for those of us with production machines it is a little different and they need to think about people with slower processors.

/forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif

[missinglina]

I would like to to see longer titles too! And they can fix the bug that lowers the volume of the titled clip!
How about a slow motion effect -- for as long as you want it to last.
Can you currently add a title on a black background (or any other color) and have the audio of the clip playing behind it? That would be nice. It's probably already there, but I can't get it to work.

[mwalker]

The trade-off with Cocoa is that applications are a lot cheaper to program, because it's faster to write them in Cocoa. The tradeoff here can even be as great as writing the application, and not writing it, because if a project needs 10 programmers vs 5 programmers, it might never get a budget.
People who criticize Cocoa for being slow also need to realize that Cocoa uses Carbon, and Carbon uses Cocoa (or at least Core Foundation) for a lot of things. iMovie (and iPhoto, for that matter) are not slower 'cause their written in Cocoa, they're slower 'cause they have a lot more features. Every new feature in any wish list will probably make the iMovie even slower, and adding "Must run fast" to the list won't help.
This is not meant as a criticism, it's just a reminded that programming isn't magic. Newer applications with more features will not run as well on older hardware. This is a fact of life in the computer industry. Unfortunately, the only solutions are (1) run only the older apps, or (2) have someone write new apps that only include the features you want, and that run fast. I guess there's (3) buy new hardware, as well.
Remember that not all programmers use the latest greatest hardware, either. Personally, I program on a less-than-1Ghz powerbook. Would I like a dual 2.5 G5? Of course. Some stuff runs really slow on the PowerBook. :-)

[mactwang]

I like most of the title ideas -- although I do like the shadows and other title effects. Little touches like those have enabled me to actually do a pro-quality promo movie on iMovie. I think I would just like to see a more efficient and flexible titler section, without taking away the cool effects. Dragging formatted text from your word processor would be the greatest. You can kind of do this with a chroma key plug in, and a little time spent in photoshop, but it takes some time to get that done.
As a side note (a little OT), I would like to see Apple integrate their titling functions tighter all across the board. I recently tried to put 360 photos from iPhoto into slideshows, and put them on a DVD to send to family. I spent a couple of hours titling all of our photos in iPhoto, and then sent each album to iDVD in several slideshows. To my dismay, i found that the photos had taken on names such as IMG_305. This was frustrating enough, but then I also discovered that there is no way to make the titles of the photos show as captions in iDVD! This surprises me a bit to discover what I think is such a glaring omission in Apple's "easy to share" design for iLife. If the person you're sending them to doesn't have a Mac, then they're out of luck for watching a slideshow with titles. I had to resort to creating and printing a spreadsheet list of the photo titles on paper (on PAPER!) to send with the DVD. I know I could make slideshows in iMovie and manually render the titles to each photo, then send them to iDVD as movies, but that would be an incredibly painstaking process. Besides, it would literally take days to title 360 photos and render those titles in iMovie -- and I shouldn't have to go through the back door like that, with something as smoothly integrated as iLife. It should be "send slideshow to iDVD with titles". Period.

[zak77]

I would like to have drag and drop importing from dvd's. This would make it very easy to make "best of compilation dvd's" from family archives.
Zak

[polrbear]

Hey! This is my first post!! It's nice to be here, surrounded by Mac-friendly people. Such a difference from the PC based school district I am in.
Anyway, I teach a Media Tech program to my students (grades 7-9), and something we would like to see added is a second video track and have two video and two audio tracks. I know some of my students would like to do some basic video and audio layering.
Martin
polrbear@shaw.ca

[moskyj]

iMovie 5 Suggestion
Subject: iMovie Photo Import to Match Bookmarks
The new bookmark feature in iMovie 4 is ideal for timing a soundtrack for a slideshow presentation. Recently we used it at our school to present a yearend slideshow to our student body. We completed our soundtrack sequence first (about six songs) and then bookmarked the soundtrack to match all the audio cues. We then imported about 400 pictures in to the sequence using straight cuts (no transitions for fast upbeat music). The tedious part was selecting each clip and setting its time to match the bookmarks (usually we made the clip extend over the next bookmark, split the playhead at the bookmark, and deleted the rest).
It would be great if Apple could incorporate a script or something that could automatically import all of the pictures into the sequence, having already shortened or lengthened each photo clip to match each of the bookmarks. This would save hours of tedious tweaking.
Also, when you create a new movie project and import new photo slides, the bookmarks from the previous movie appear in the sequence. It would be great if iMovie 5 would allow us to start off with a clean slate, and not have to remove all of the old bookmarks first. This would avoid confusion.

[dtmatsuno]

Longer titles would be good. The work around is to create them in landscape view in any text editor and print to PDF. These can be imported as clips, imported to iPhoto and imported as stills, or changed to JPGs and imported any of the above ways. Using rich text or HTML allows graphics on a title page. The big problem that I have had is that 'locked' audio clips will not stay 'Locked'. I have also found that it is often difficult to shorten or lengthen a clip with click and drag. I have had to 'split at playhead' and delete.