A disappointing shell of the original – iMovie Review

I got my first taste of iMovie when I bought my smoke gray Apple iMac DV Special Edition 21 years ago. Back then, it was revolutionary – incredibly simple and intuitive, yet an extremely powerful video editing tool. It’s not hyperbole to say that the original iMovie brought video editing – which back then required specialized equipment and software costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars – to the masses. Given my history with this app, it’s hard to find the words to express how disappointed I am with this version. It’s no longer simple, no longer intuitive, and worst of all, VERY limiting to creativity. Just two examples: • In the original iMovie, when you separated audio & video, THEY WERE ACTUALLY SEPARATED, and the user could edit them separately, going so far as to lay new video clips over existing sound. You can’t do that in this version. If you delete a video clip, even after detaching the sound, the sound is deleted with it. • In the original iMovie, you could render a frame of video as a still, effectively creating a freeze frame, which could be made any length you want to make it. You can’t do that in this version. Furthermore, if you create a freeze frame in your source video in your photo library by pausing where you want it and doing a screen capture of it, then import it as a still into iMovie, it defaults to the “Ken Burns Effect,” with the photo frame zoomed in on a small portion of the photo. You can disable the Burns Effect, but you can’t then zoom out the photo to its original size and framing to use it as a freeze frame within the video it came from. If there are workarounds to solve these issues, I haven’t been able to find them in Apple’s iMovie Help or in third-party forums. I could go on and on talking about things I could do in the original iMovie 21 years ago (on a computer that had less RAM and less graphics memory than my iPad has now), but I’ll stop here. The bottom line is that Apple, in “streamlining” this app for iOS, took out all the features that made the original iMovie such a powerful tool, and such a joy to use. I only gave it 2 stars because it’s not totally useless. Just mostly useless.
Review by bhirschi on iMovie.