Sunday, September 5, 2010

Adventures in iMovie...The New Film Experience

As in all adventures, I started trying to create this amazing video that I wanted to call the Rhetoric Remix...I had high expectations and wanted so much for it to work. My downfall, trying to use downloaded video from the Internet on Movie Maker. I tried several times to edit my clips and piece them together, but each time I managed to edit my program would freeze and reload losing all work. After an hour of redoing the same cut over and over, I just gave up!

Now this is not a plug for Mac or a soap box about the perils of PC, but I truly believe there are some things easier done Mac. Videos are easier on Mac. Generally speaking I have used PC for its accessibility and general ease of use. Playing with the sample video clips on Movie Maker was easy and there are a lot of different effects as well as transitions. Here's the downside. Movie Maker does not accept a lot of downloaded video clips for editing. So forget the whole create your own video from YouTube videos. Cutting videos is also a little rough as you have to keep a close eye on the time in order to choose the start and stop times. Finally there is a limited number of title choices that are really limited to font style and size.

iMovie for Mac seems to be a lot simpler to use from the start. All videos that have been loaded onto the Mac are in the work area immediately under the story board and view screen. You can either choose to drag and drop an entire video clip to the story board or you can pre-cut from the import screen. Adding extras such as blank screens, titles, photos, and music is no problem on the insert menu. Everything is drag and drop. Like MovieMaker, I will use the MPEG4 file format for my video in iMovie. This allows the video to be played on both QuickTime and MediaPlayer.

Now, I'll be honest. I did not view any iMovie tutorials until after I had posted my video on YouTube. I did go back and view the tutorial that comes on the Mac, and lets just say it was easy to learn without the tutorial and even easier with the tutorial. I did a search for iMovie tutorials on Google and YouTube, and to my disappointment the videos were all done by kids! Well, maybe it is not disappointing...these kids were doing some neat things with iMovie. I just couldn't listen to them for very long. I sometimes over analyze the presentation of others...that's the speech teacher in me.

At this point, I know that my preference has changed to Mac for media related products. I prefer iPhoto to PhotoStory, iMovie to MovieMaker, and iTunes to MediaPlayer. I have truly been insired after my daughter's dance to her video to continue learning to use iMovie to create family movies from our camcorder.

No comments:

Post a Comment