After catching Steve Jobs’s salesmanship at Macworld last month, I went out and plunked down $99 at Fry’s for iLife ’06. Haven’t played with all the new features yet — iPhoto certainly looks more robust — but the chief reason for buying it was to pull together a dazzling video for some presentations I’m about to give starting next week.
My mistake. iMovie 6.0 will dazzle when it’s ready for prime time, but it’s not quite there yet.
• The new themes section seems buggy on my Powerbook G4 (OS 10.4.4) — renders slowly, causes crashes, etc. Themes will let you string together photos or videos as they dance across your computer screen.
• When it is working, the themes section apparently offers no way to configure your scene. Often it’s one image, take it or leave it. Very brittle, little flexibility.
• I just rendered a 14-second video in the “Pass through | Chapter” theme. It took three hours (with 512mb of RAM). It didn’t do at all what I expected.
• If you add one video and 2 images to a Theme, you would think you should be able to hear the video’s audio. Not so.
• You’d think there would be some extended explanation of the new features contained in iMovie 6.0, particularly themes and “drop zones” and Video FX. Not so. Explained less than well in the Help section documentation.
• There’s still no way to get a colored background in iMovie behind your text. Your only choice is black. Or, as Henry Ford used to say, “You can have it in any color, so long as it’s black.” Why? My programmer friends could add this functionality in an afternoon’s time.
• The text options have seen no upgrade. The most glaring shortcoming of iMovie is that you can’t display two equal-sized lines of text in the center of the screen (one is larger than the other). With iMovie 6.0, there’s still no way to do this. Instead, you have to do a 20-minute workaround by creating a document, adding text, importing it and tweaking it. It’s enough to make me go out and learn how to use my Final Cut Pro.
A few similar sentiments expressed on the Apple message forums. Wrote one: “If you have not bought iLife 06 – DON’T…”
I’ve been checking daily for an iMovie 6.0.1 update. Nothing so far.
All this should not give comfort to the PC users in the land (I live in a cross-platform household). Apple still leads the industry by a mile when it comes to empowering users with the tools of the personal media revolution. Which is why it’s so disappointing when it does anything that comes up short.
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First, you should point how amazing iMovie is to begin with. To use your Ford analogy, it’s a car versus a drafthorse (on the PC) – you should emphasize more there is nothing like it on the PC versus harping on a few minor things … that I think if you bothered to post the question on the Apple discussion page, you would’ve gotten an answer in 10 minutes.
Yes, imovie is limiting in some ways because Apple wants you to buy FCE or FCP but it’s really for “average” users and BTW, here are some things you can do …
To center multiple lines of text (the same size) – use the SUBTITLE TEXT feature.
Then go to the EFFECTS panel – select LETTERBOX and shift UP (all the way) – now you have centered text. Took me um … 5 seconds? Is that acceptable to you?
You want COLOR? – have you actually DESELECTED the button (in TITLES) that reads “OVER BLACK” Then click on COLOR and the Apple color selector pops up? You can choose any color in the color spectrum? No need for programmer friends. it takes .5 seconds of clicking.
The price of ilife is $79 and the family edition is $99.
You shoudl warn people that most memory and graphics intensive apps are best done on a desktop and if you’re going to do something as intensive on a more limited machine (as in your RAM siatuation), you should always re-started your machine, flush out and reset the RAm and then begin the task. You’re always going to be limited with running on so little RAM so set it and drink a cup of coffee or something (decaf for you) because even if it takes you 14 minutes to do something, you should point out the alternative is
you cannot do it AT ALL on the PC. Most people would rather have to drive slowly up a mountain than c;imb it on foot.
I’m not claiminig ilife or Apple are perfect but you’re so focused on a few items when there are 10 seconds or less solutions that the fault really lies in you and not necessarily the app.
jbelkin, your email was extremely helpful, thanks very much.
one usually doesn’t go to support forums to discuss feature requests, so if iMovie has had these capabilities for a while and they’re hidden from the user, that’s a UI shortcoming.
Actually the original post wanted to add text to a color background… EZ to do in imovie.
Go to iMovie Help and search for Creating color clip.
Create the color clip ( any color you want, and make the duration longer than your title.
In titles deselect “Over Black, and apply the title to the color clip. Now delete the extra color clip not used by the title… DONE
Themes are much improved in iMovie 6.0.1 ( available today)… hey Apple listened….