[ale] easy, simple TV ad campaign assembly? (gone a bit [OT])

[aaron]

On Wednesday 03 September 2008 07:02, Geoffrey wrote:
> aaron wrote:
> > iMovie (with the exception of iMovie 2008) is your
> > friend.  Even an aging PowerPC Mac OSX machine
> > will be up to the task if it is 800mhz G3 or better.
> 
> Aaron,
> 
> I'm curious as to why you say 'with the exception of iMovie 2008.'  Are 
> there issues with it that you can share?

Apple kept expanding on the basic tools and layout of iMovie from
version 2.0 through iMovieHD 6 (which was part of the iLife 2006 pkg).
While iMovie 3 introduced some sluggishness into the interface and
a few bugs, most of the features were improvements and both
sluggishness and bugs were greatly reduced with iMovie4.

Accompanying Leopard OSeX 10.5 release was iLife 2008.  Apple
abandoned the familiar and practical tools of iMovie in the 2008
version, removing the time line view of the project entirely and thus
dumping a number of important, ubiquitous and commonly used
editing control functions. They touted their new "storyboard" view as 
something totally ground breaking and user friendly, which was
an incredibly arrogant fraud to people like myself who were extremely
familiar with "storyboard" interfaces from running the Amiga Toaster
Flyer since 1993 (a system, BTW, whose only significant limitation
was that it didn't provide any time line based editing controls -- some
elementary editing functions like back timing or syncing audio were
very difficult to do until third party programmers started providing
some cool and inventive workaround tools).

iMovie 08 is also buggy as hell, to the point that I have YET to see it 
actually running on a Leopard system.  I've been to a half dozen
places that sell Macs since Leopard was released and have tried to
run iMovie 08 on at least a dozen different demo Macs -- it has failed
at startup on every machine.  I have yet to see the program actually
running anywhere but in the lame ass tutorial pixeos on the apple
site.

The worthlessness of iMovie 08 isn't just my opinion, either.  There
was a MASSIVE outcry from the iMovie user base who made the
nightmare mistake of cripple-grading from iMHD to iM08.  Apple
had to choke down Steve's ego and make the upgrade from iM08
to iMHD available for free download:
< http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/imovieHD6.html >
< http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/08/09/
apple-makes-imovie-hd-6-available-for-download >

It's been over a year now and there is still no new iMovie09 release
that has restored usability to the iMovie line and nothing has been
done to salvage iMovie08.

So... iMovie 08 (and beyond? ) are useless, but iMovie 2.0 through
through iMovieHD (aka iMovie06) are great, easy to use and very
powerful media production tools. They can produce highly
professional results on their own, but even more so when combined
with the very affordable SlickFX  packages of transitions, tools and
effects:  < http://www.geethree.com/index.html > 

peace
aaron