PE1_iMovie

Giving iMovie its props

I've used iMovie in this program quite a bit already, but mostly stumbling and fumbling along. Years ago, when I got to direct a few industrials, I got pretty good with Adobe Premier, at that time the only Windows NLE editing tool when Windows was the only OS running on notebook computers (I have finally, after almost 3 decades and about a dozen win laptops and notebooks, been converted to the Church of Mac by the truly amazing Spotlight tool and these beautifully robust Macbook Pro's), but all that knowledge seems to have leaked out of my aging brain.
We use Final Cut Pro in the first half of our program, and then start them on Avid in the course that follows mine, so for the past couple of years I have been trying to learn those very massive, deep and complex programs. As an Art Director, I never had much exposure to editing in my movie career, and I haven't had much time to work with these programs, so I when I tried to use FCP here in EMDT, I got stumped by the interface every couple of minutes, and so decided to try and use iMovie.
After a bit of frustration with it as well - you can see the horrible organization of my events above - I went into Garrick Chow's excellent lynda.com tutorial, and jumped around trying to pick up just what I needed to surmount whatever hurdle was defeating me in any of the assignments I working on. So I was pleased with this assignment that has asked me to complete the tutorial and get more deft with what turns out to be a pretty good piece of software, that had, from my professional Hollywood POV,  always seemed pitifully home movie.

You can see how much more complex FCP is from this screen shot.

The newest version of Final Cut, FCPX, has been getting scathed in my community as just an iMovie upgrade, and almost no one who uses FCP professionally, seems to be upgrading yet. But, there are a lot of things about iMovie that seem so much more intuitive than FCP, that I suspect this may be an excellent development. Avid Media Composer was the first and still is the standard NLE editing tool, and so both Premier and FCP had to adapt much of its workflow. But I suspect Apple cut iMovie out of whole cloth, and so they do have some ideas that while superior to the timeline multi-window approach of Avid, are having a hard time finding any penetration.
So I am now looking at this iMovie training as good prep for my hopefully upcoming conversion to FCPX, which as you can see, probably has the best of both worlds.

So looking forward to gettign back to it now. I have reviewed the basic lessons I skimmed before, and am now moving into the more advanced, which I will also review in more detail. Oh boy!.