I’ve been listening to all the whiners saying that iMovie ’08 is a backward step compared to iMovie HD and I can’t believe how myopic they are being!

When I got a Mac I was really looking forward to simple and quick movie editing, I have TONS of old footage from my PC days that I ended up moving to MPEG2 before selling the mini-DV camera. Could iMovie HD use it? No, not even after shelling out for the Quicktime MPEG2 component and Quicktime Pro. Using MPEG Streamclip I was able to get going without any further picture quality degradation, but I now had TWO copies of each video clip.

Did iMovie HD work with my newer JVC Everio? No. Again, MPEG Streamclip comes to the rescue, and I have TWO copies of each of those clips too. By now, I’ve shelled out on an external HDD just for video.

Now, we come to editing with iMovie HD. Can I browse all my footage? No. I had to import the clips I wanted for each specific project into iMovie HD. This import was real SLOW and if I used the same clip in two projects, I had to do the import twice AND iMovie HD created yet another copy each time I did this (within the project) and that copy used a HUGE amount of disk space. I could see myself buying yet another external HDD just to backup iMovie HD projects to. So, now I had THREE copies of each clip that I used in a project, on occassion more.

So, I just put off doing video projects – too much hassle.

Now comes ‘Movie 08 to the rescue.

• It can read all my Everio stuff directly
• It moves all my footage into it’s own library, but in the original format which I can get back. So, no longer multiple copies.
• Projects reference the library, so there isn’t a third HUGE copy within the project.
• It has a neat media browser built in, supporting events, keywords, date ranges, live previews, filtering.
• It’s FAST

OK, we’ve lost a few special effects, themes, transitions and precision editing – but we’ve gained a much more efficient design. I do hope Apple do address the “missing” features, but I am not going to be going back to iMovie HD because iMovie ’08 does what I need quickly and efficiently making video editing pleasant again.