Yes, the iphone gets version 3.0 and some new features with it.

I wouldn’t normally post about this, but it’s a chance to try the BBC’s embedded video again. I’m so glad that I can embed this rather than the full presentation video where, I swear, the presentation ‘jazz-hands’ of the speakers was going to drive me to murder.

Unless there is some weird technology tic-tac going on here, whoever does the speaker training at Apple needs to get pockets in their trousers.

Avid has made little or no impression in the US newspaper video market but here in the UK it’s express software is fast becoming a standard. I cut on both Avid and  Final Cut Pro and have done for a while and would have to say that love them both as I do the transition from one to another is not always easy.

If you start on an Avid I think you would find the move to FCP pretty straight forward. No suprise given that the editing paradigm is now the same across most of the big name apps. But going the other way?  Avid can be pretty daunting on first go. It takes a few clicks before you even get something that looks like the interface and it can often feel a bit closed compared to FCP.

It’s worth sticking with though as, in some ways, it feels more solid and reliable.

Avid for FCP users

So if you are thinking of expreimenting or a change of job means making the switch then help is at hand.

As part of their more concerted approach  to community engagement Avid have pushed the boat out on the tutorial front.  Laura Congleton has a 4 part series on Avid for Final Cut Pro Users that covers most of the basics and a few steps beyond.

Well worth a look

Not more link bait. Although try putting iphone or Mac Air in to a post and watch Akismet go mental.

No, this was a post by Dennis Dunleavy which points to a photo essay shot entirely on an iphone by Mother Jones magazine Washington Bureau Chief, David Corn. And boy doesn’t it show just how ropey the iphone cam can be.

Dunleavy predicts that

Corn’s approach is most likely something that will remain with us in an age where anyone with a camera phone can snap away a kilter and publish the results instantly.

And even though he doesn’t see it as the death knell for photojournalism, it’s something we have to get used to.

Even if the pictures aren’t perfect, they still count as a visual record of events. The more people like Corn remain enthusiastic enough to play around with the iPhone at major events, the more extensive the visual reportage becomes. And that isn’t all that bad.

On lighter note, the vagaries of the iphone cam did make me look twice at a shot of Rudy Giuliani. Couldn’t quite put my finger on what it reminded me of…

No? Just me then.

OK, that’s shameless link bait. But I’m generally disappointed with what appeared at Macworld.

Yes, the new laptop is nice. Yes, I’m sure it’s a breakthrough in engineering. But I’m also sure it will probably find that it gets most of its business as an option for those who where also considering a PC laptop as long as it would come with diamonte cover.

After the recent flurry of cool hardware like the ipod touch and Iphone- truly innovative – I was hoping that they would give me more of what I moved to Mac for in the first place – killer apps.

When I decided to go Mac it was because Final Cut Pro and all the apps around it worked together. I was cutting on an Avid (which just happened to be running on a mac) using things like After Effects for the complex stuff. But even when PC’s got more powerful, when I looked at my PC laptop, I couldn’t see anything that came close to offering the flexibiltiy that the Apple software offered. I wanted that flexibility so I had to go mac.

FCP is now such a mature app that anything they add is just icing on the cake. There is no point in reinventing the wheel.

But until there is that killer app. That FCP that demands an air or a macbook pro. If I was PC based I would be finding less reason to make the shift this year.

Over the last few posts I’ve focused two of the three s’s that I think are areas to focus on for web/newspaper video- script and  sequences.  The last in the series was going to be sound.

In that way the web works I’ve come across a series of posts on the Apple website that  says pretty much everything I want to say and more! Hurrah you say – less of that rambling idiot. But don’t get too comfy. I’m still planning to pop up a post with examples with more emphasis on sound and video working together.

But, whilst I flex my poorly subbed blogging muscles have a read of apples guide to Telling Stories with Sound

Doug Fisher has been busy working his way round the generally hated new imovie and come up with some gems of information.

He is collecting them in a…
Igonore the above. In the excitement of finding the tips I didn’t put two and two together and note that it was actually Aaron Miller who has started a new blog called Unlocking imovie.

Still, fantastic stuff and worth a look.

Sorry Aaron for the confusion.

Amongst the things going on I have found time to do a bit of playing around with the new imovie 08. Having seen the ad’s and a couple of the demo movies on the apple site I’d expressed a level of geeky impressed’ness so you can imagine I was keen to try it out.

The hype

Angela Grant had linked to my initial ‘geek love’ post, pointing out that quite a few people didn’t like the new package. I know that a number of features of the imovie HD are gone. Bakari Chavanu at MyMac pretty much covers pretty much all of them (some of his gripes are functional rather than features).

• No audio extraction feature.
• No chapter markers for DVD authoring.
• No iMovie themes.
• Lack of control over fade-in and out of audio.
• You cannot open completed projects in older versions of iMovie in the newer ’08 version.
• You can’t slow down or speed up the content of a clip!
• No advance video editing controls. (by this he means audio and video fx)
• No support for third-party plug-ins.
• There’s no pause control for titles.

Looks like some serious ommisions here and people are noting more every day. But reading around it seems that the most common complaints seem to fall in to three main areas

1. it won’t run on my old mac
2. the themes have gone
3. some of the tricks and bells and whistles have gone.

The first one is a serious point. Having just upgraded my mac to run bootcamp and one or two other apps I know a mac is requires a serious cash commitment if you find yourself needing new features (and I would say that this isn’t the bit of software that demands that commitment). But with my ‘newspaper/journalist’ friendly hat on I would say I have little time for the last two as serious complaints.

Themes are always going to be old hat before you open the box and a lot of the bells and whistles where making the program bloated and obtuse to use. Mark Hamilton rightly points out that imovieHD ‘was a competent (although limited) video editing program’. He is right, and it that sense it’s a same to see some of the stuff go. But it was getting very close to Final Cut Express (for not far off the price tag) and, as a result, was no where near as easy to use as FCE.

But enough about the debate. Given my focus is on multimedia video for journalists, what did I think?

Here’s a look at some of the key areas.

Importing (getting your video in)

A lot has been made of the compatibility and functionality of imovie with HD formats. It also offers support for the AVCHD format which is cropping up on a lot of HD and flash camcorders. The video tutorial on Apple’s website gives a good overview of the kind of functionality this will offer so I’m not going to dwell on it.

I tried capturing HD and the only technical decision to make was whether to go full (1920×1080) or ‘large’ (950×540) quality. Your choice will depend on space and your output but both gave acceptable picture quality for content that is ultimatley going on the web. Even those of us looking to go ‘HD’ on our webvideo.

Capturing can be done in automatic mode, where the tape is rewound to the beginning (or all of the HD/Card is captured) and then imported. Or you can use manual mode and select the shots or cue the tape using transport controls. That may not suit everyone and I can already imagine people will be asking for some kind of logging tools, but the ability to control the machine with neat controls – more than is often available in FCExpress – was a nice touch and made the whole thing reassuringly straightforward.

The set up really only realies on two or three text boxes and a few radio buttons and could be covered in a simple how-to on a piece of paper for technophobic journos. I tried it with my Sony HVR-A1 and found the control and capture part easy and error free. The record indicator could have been a lot bigger (a large red record light please) but pretty good none the less.

Interface and organisation

The interface is neat, much neater, and better laid out than the old imovie. Apple seems to be shifting away from the timeline dominant presentation and going more for iphoto style organisation over editing (one of the points apple is really pushing). I like it and if it’s done right it may be a shape of things to come. On a side note, I would imagine users of Vegas may see a style here that they are familiar with.

When you import footage, it’s organized in to events, based on time and date, which you can then edit in to a project. The term event is a little too consumer for my liking but I can see that having stuff organized by date might fit to a newsroom approach; an event could be a story.

You can filter these events and even mark favorite parts buy marking a section of your rushes and clicking the star button (another nod to the iphoto/aperture style) and it’s this marking and selection process that is impressive.

Once a clip is imported it is displayed in the event window as a long filmstrip . Running your mouse over the clip gives you a scrub style preview in the filmstrip and in the main viewer, alowing you to select a shot. A click-and-drag on the strip highlights an area in yellow. Apple say this is like selecting text. I agree. For a long time I have said that at its most basic video editing tools should be used and thought of, more as an app like Word.

Selected areas can then be dragged in to the project to form a timeline in a similar way to older versions of imovie. At this point it is also worth mentioning the nifty layout tricks here. You can change the positioning of the events and project windows with a click of a button to go from organising to editing and it’s all done with apple’s trademark genie effect – very cool.

Editing

It’s when you start editing that you really notice the tweaks to the interface and the editing paradigm. The Word analogy begins to really hold up. The same film strip presentation is there just like the strip in the event window and you can select some or all of a clip to effect or delete. When you do select all or part of a clip, a handy little prompt tells you how long the marked area is as well as which event it comes from.

Adding a transition is a simple drag and drop between the edits. But don’t expect a huge number of transitions to choose from. Apart from the dissolve and the fade through’s its a patchy mix that’s more reminiscent of windows movie maker than a creative apple app.

The picture can be adjusted in realtime with options for exposure, brightness etc and a little colour wheel to adjust the White Point. This makes for one of the simplest white balance correctors I have seen. Very intuitive.

This is about as far as those effects can go, hence a lot of the griping about a lack of effects,but given that this as much as many editors would do to an edit anyway and given that it’s in real time, I think it’s a nice feature.

Audio

A big criticism of the update has been the problems with audio and I must admit that the audio in the new set-up isn’t as intuitive as it could be. Any imported footage is displayed in the timeline without the audio as a ‘track’. The filmstrip is the whole clip.

In previous versions of imovie the audio was a separate strip which could be extracted and individually edited. That function is gone. Instead it’s only spot sounds and music that gets it’s own ‘track’ which is displayed as either an all enveloping background sound or, if a sound is already there, another track on top of the sound.

It’s a neat idea which looks great. Adjusting the relative levels is fairly straightforward but it needs a more obvious and visual way of seeing the relative levels of the tracks. Given the more consumer approach I don’t see why there couldn’t have been a little mixer window.

Having said that imovie does talk to other apps and most of the audio work could be done in Garageband, but more of that later.

Titles

I always found titles unnecessarily fiddly in the old imovie. The process of adding them is much simpler but the range of titles is much reduced. Users of Aperture, Pages, Keynote or any other recent Apple app will be familiar with the font and color tools and in general the titles are not too fussy in design and as a result very usable.

Exporting

When you are done editing you can then share your video. This part of the upgrade has caused a lot of interest not least because it offers the ability to upload direct to Youtube as well as the usual options for itunes, dotmac and quicktime files. I’m sure many will find the resolutions on offer a bit limiting but then many seem to using third party apps like Sorenson squeeze to work with their webvideo so no one really loses out here.

One of the share options allows you to add the project to the Media Browser. Doing this means it’s available to use in other ilife apps. By sharing your movie in the media browser you can access the movie in Garageband and do any audio editing you need to do there by dropping the video in to a podcast project. Relying on a one size fits all app just isn’t going to cut it anymore if you want the tools.

The other great addition for newsrooms already with Apple software is the ability to export a FCP/FCE compatible xml file. A rough cut in imovie could be exported to FCP and finsihed with b-roll/cut-aways, titles and any other finessing. This may help work through workflws where you have an editor working with a journalist and certainly means a less painful integration with exisiting kit.

Conclusions

I love the new imovie. It’s nowhere near as functional as imovieHD but I still love it. Why?

If you are going to engage with Macs as your main newsroom production tool then it may be a good time to get used to the way Apple is going with its software. Look at the new Final Cut Pro studio. That isnt an all in one editing package. It’s a suite of apps that allow you to edit (FCP, soundtrack), finish (Motion, color) and output content(Compressor or DVD Studio pro). Like rooms in a production facility, each app does it’s own job.

The ilife suite is slowley building up to follow that idea. You edit in imovie, tweak sound in Garageband and then share it out. Think of ilife as just one of a suite of apps you would use and your going to get more out of it and your going to be editing more like a pro than you would be with a boat load of themes and fancy fx.

Of course that does mean there is a lot missing from this imovie. Integration with the other apps in the suite isnt all it could be. A way to export to Garageband with individual tracks would be neat and the loss of chapter markers for iDVD is a real loss for those who use imovie exclusively as their production tool. I also think it may be worth Apple looking at some consumer finishing tool – a kind of motion and color combined. Something that will allow a user to polish and export stuff.

As for use within a newsroom production environment I think that anyone relying solely on imovie should avoid this update at all costs unless they want to change their working patterns. But if you work in a mixed facility with a lot of macs then this could be for you.

Heres a possible example: The journo/vj comes back and captures all the footage in to the machine. Using imovie they rough cut the interview to a project. They also cherry pick some good soundbites for a quick upload to youtube as a teaser. When they are done the project is exported as xml and handed over to a picture editor who can tidy up the interview and add any b-roll content. Whilst the editor is doing this the journo can be scripting or writing the print article.

I know some will say that FCE is simple enough to learn and I agree. Kind of. But at the price point and with the kind of integration it offers the new imovie offers a taste of a way of working that may be the shape of things to come. The changes to the interface may look simple but it takes a step towards a more task based way of editing rather than the timeline paradigm we have been used to.

Apple aren’t the only ones doing this. Take a look at Avid instinct (shown left)and you will see a similar approach being tried, specifically aimed at journos.

In the end there is a way to go(and no doubt a few well aimed updates) before this version is going to win the hearts and minds of imovieHD user who uses this to edit everything they do. And if you really miss it you can run both on the same machine. But if you are looking for a simple, uncluttered, intuitive app for quick cuts that will also play nice with FCP and FCE then I think it might just be worth a look.

So I’m going to enjoy it whilst it’s still lean and mean. imovie08 is a taste of things to come and I for one am looking forward to future.

Update: Read my  review of imovie08 to see if it lived up to my expectations…

The new version of imovie is out and it looks great. In particular the way you can interact with thumbnails by ‘skimming’ them.

Watch the video on the Apple web site and prepare to go ‘oooooooh’