Walking Backwards for Christmas
iMovie. Pah!
The pinnacle of software civilisation, for me, was Movie 2.0.* If iMovie 1.0 brought video editing to the masses, version 2.0 made it into a gobsmackingly brilliant experience. It was fast, it was stable, it was fun. I could take a 1-hour mini DV tape and turn it into a 5-minute Masterpiece Theatre in a couple of hours - and that includes the hour it would take to run through the entire tape, capturing clips. I had a 400MHz G3 iMac at the time - a blue one, followed by a grey one.
No I've got a 1.something GHz G5 iMac, 20" screen, 1GB RAM - a respectable home system. Is the software faster, just as stable, just as easy to use? Is it fuck.
iMovie 3 was a dog, frankly, one of the most pointless "upgrades" in the history of computing - and there have been a fair few. I'm sure Photoshop adherents can point to a few doozies, and who could forget the largely pointless moves from Quark 3.1 to 4 and then 5, and then 6?
Sometimes an upgrade is pointless, and often it makes things actually worse. Word 6 on the Mac was an absolute smack in the face compared to version 5. The move from Office X on the Mac to the 2004 version was, apparently, merely a demonstration of just how much packaging a simple CD could have.
iMovie 3 was slower than version 2 and less stable. Version 4 speeded things up a bit, but was still unstable. And now we have iMovie HD, which is like version 4, but "upgraded" so that it will work with video formats that most people don't have, for playback on televisions that most people also don't have. And it's still unstable.
The main problem is with the audio. It does not play nicely with Core Audio, whether you use the internal audio or an external interface. You get clicks and pops, which are audio sampling errors. You get random bursts of white noise (which only a quit and relaunch will fix), and you get random crashes.
So, instead of taking a couple of hours, my 5 minute masterpieces now take, oh, twice that time, at least, with the concurrent annoyance and frustration. So Apple brought video editing to the masses, and then they took it away again. It's not fun anymore, to the point that I don't want to do it, so my camcorder is under-used, and the unedited tapes pile up, and the size of the job gets bigger and more procrastinated.
But Christmas is coming, and I've got to produce the annual DVD, so I forced myself to waste my entire Sunday trying to work with it. iMovie HD kept crashing, so I uninstalled it and reverted to version 4 (downloaded the updates etc). But that too kept crashing (and f*ucked earlier projects I'd done with HD), so I reinstalled HD and downloaded the updates to that. Again. Bloody rubbish. And don't get me started on iDVD and iPhoto...
===
*I really believe that, for lots of reasons. The main one is that iMovie works like software instead of trying to look like a traditional hardware editing system (like Final Cut Pro does). Pro edit systems have to appeal to professionals who have been "doing it the hard way" for years and years - so the interface has to look familiar to them. iMovie, because it didn't need to pander to professionals, could work like software (i.e. only showing you the tools/features you're using, hiding the others till you need them).
The pinnacle of software civilisation, for me, was Movie 2.0.* If iMovie 1.0 brought video editing to the masses, version 2.0 made it into a gobsmackingly brilliant experience. It was fast, it was stable, it was fun. I could take a 1-hour mini DV tape and turn it into a 5-minute Masterpiece Theatre in a couple of hours - and that includes the hour it would take to run through the entire tape, capturing clips. I had a 400MHz G3 iMac at the time - a blue one, followed by a grey one.
No I've got a 1.something GHz G5 iMac, 20" screen, 1GB RAM - a respectable home system. Is the software faster, just as stable, just as easy to use? Is it fuck.
iMovie 3 was a dog, frankly, one of the most pointless "upgrades" in the history of computing - and there have been a fair few. I'm sure Photoshop adherents can point to a few doozies, and who could forget the largely pointless moves from Quark 3.1 to 4 and then 5, and then 6?
Sometimes an upgrade is pointless, and often it makes things actually worse. Word 6 on the Mac was an absolute smack in the face compared to version 5. The move from Office X on the Mac to the 2004 version was, apparently, merely a demonstration of just how much packaging a simple CD could have.
iMovie 3 was slower than version 2 and less stable. Version 4 speeded things up a bit, but was still unstable. And now we have iMovie HD, which is like version 4, but "upgraded" so that it will work with video formats that most people don't have, for playback on televisions that most people also don't have. And it's still unstable.
The main problem is with the audio. It does not play nicely with Core Audio, whether you use the internal audio or an external interface. You get clicks and pops, which are audio sampling errors. You get random bursts of white noise (which only a quit and relaunch will fix), and you get random crashes.
So, instead of taking a couple of hours, my 5 minute masterpieces now take, oh, twice that time, at least, with the concurrent annoyance and frustration. So Apple brought video editing to the masses, and then they took it away again. It's not fun anymore, to the point that I don't want to do it, so my camcorder is under-used, and the unedited tapes pile up, and the size of the job gets bigger and more procrastinated.
But Christmas is coming, and I've got to produce the annual DVD, so I forced myself to waste my entire Sunday trying to work with it. iMovie HD kept crashing, so I uninstalled it and reverted to version 4 (downloaded the updates etc). But that too kept crashing (and f*ucked earlier projects I'd done with HD), so I reinstalled HD and downloaded the updates to that. Again. Bloody rubbish. And don't get me started on iDVD and iPhoto...
===
*I really believe that, for lots of reasons. The main one is that iMovie works like software instead of trying to look like a traditional hardware editing system (like Final Cut Pro does). Pro edit systems have to appeal to professionals who have been "doing it the hard way" for years and years - so the interface has to look familiar to them. iMovie, because it didn't need to pander to professionals, could work like software (i.e. only showing you the tools/features you're using, hiding the others till you need them).
posted by Anonymous at
Monday, October 10, 2005
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