New movie, same plot

If you were expecting a GarageBand-style triumph in the iMovie department, you might want to change the channel. iMovie 1.2 is the same B-grade iMovie with a Hollywood facelift.

See, editing videos is hard. Unfortunately, iMovie’s commitment to dumbing down the process actually serves as an obstacle. If you’ve used video editors before, you’ll have to relearn almost everything. If you’re new to video editing, you’ll have to search through a bewildering sequence of reverse pinches, double-taps, and holds to manage the simplest of actions (like adjusting transitions and clip volume). Unfortunately, help menus are located outside of the project, so you’ll need to access the main menu each time you have a question. Sure, nobody’s expecting to create the next Avatar on an iPad, but creating a one-minute movie with a song and voice-over shouldn’t be rocket science.

If it looks sloppy and inefficient, you should try using it.

The faults ultimately boil down to a single problem: iMovie doesn’t allow true multiple track editing -- ironic, as it’s one of GarageBand’s finest features. Instead, iMovie slaps on premade transitions clips for simplicity’s sake, and while it’s certainly simple at its basest level, any time you try to make something look less simple, you have to fight the application. For instance, there’s no way to adjust a title’s appearance or duration without changing the movie’s theme. We were glad to see slightly better audio controls and a few new themes, helping it improve from its 1.0 version, but at the end of the day, very few of our initial complaints have been addressed.

The bottom line. While iMovie is easy enough for beginners to understand, its frustrating lack of options and complicated ways of doing simple things make this app a box-office bust.