Bijan Sabet

My trouble with iMovie ‘09

You don’t have to visit this blog too many times to know I enjoy Apple products.

These days we have 4 Macs in our house, two iPhones and 4 ipods.

And I use iPhoto, iTunes and iWork regularly and for the most part happily.

This weekend, I got my hands dirty with iMovie ‘09. In a nutshell the user experience was pretty bad.

Here’s what I wanted to do: make a DVD for a friend from about 6 relatively short video clips taken from our Flip Mino along with 20 photos and a few songs playing behind those photos.

I remember a few versions ago, iMovie was simple and straightfoward. Now it feels like a mess.

I couldn’t figure out how to fade the audio track out from one to another.

I couldn’t figure out how to fade out the music at the end of project.

By default it applied Ken Burns to each photo. I couldn’t figure out to change that for all photos at once.

Do I really have to make a project in iMovie and then export to iDVD to burn a disk? Why can’t I just make my project in iMovie and hit burn somewhere.

I wanted to overlay a photo on top of the video at one point. I couldn’t figure that out either.

As long as Apple forces me to use iDVD to burn a disk then please give me beautiful themes at least. Is there a way to import themes from a 3rd party because I didn’t like any of the stock themes.

I think the time is right for someone to create a beautiful and simple alternative to iMovie.

Pretty please.