When Apple introduced iMovie ‘08, it created a schism in the Mac video-editing world. On one hand, the new version introduced an entirely new interface that made editing quick, casual movies far easier than before. On the other hand, Apple was so busy implementing this new model that it didn’t have time to reimplement all the features of previous iterations, leaving a lot of iMovie users believing the new version was really a step backward. Now, Apple has updated iMovie for ’09, and this time around, it’s bound to please almost everyone. 

 

For starters, iMovie ‘09 offers most of the features found in previous versions. One of these sorely missed features is Themes, which lets you incorporate snazzy, broadcast-quality motion graphics into your projects (there are six customizable themes to choose from--fewer than previous versions, but more polished). Video effects have returned as well, including effects like Aged Film, Film Grain, Glow, Dream, and Vignette. You can also now speed up, slow down, and freeze-frame your clips, as well as separate audio from video within a clip. More importantly, iMovie now acknowledges the existence of iDVD. iDVD is apparently the black sheep of Apple’s iLife family, but iMovie nonetheless is deigned to let you embed chapter markers into your projects and export projects directly to iDVD.

But not only does iMovie ‘09 finally catch up on features from older editions, it also breaks entirely new ground…lots of new ground, in fact. A prime example is the new image-stabilization feature, which helps take the jitter and bounce out of your handheld shots. Of course, many video cameras today already offer image stabilization, and some models--those using optical stabilization--do a pretty impressive job. But iMovie can help even more.

We tested the feature with a number of shots--for instance, in one test, we walked down a long path while keeping the camera focused straight ahead, and in another test, we stood still while zooming in all the way on a distant object (the zoom magnifies any movement in your hands and arms). For iMovie to work its stabilization magic, it has to analyze y our clips first, which takes time--a 15 second clip took about 5 minutes on a 2.8GHz iMac.

 

Results weren’t miraculous, but in most cases made an appreciable improvement to our original footage. One downside, however, is that stabilized footage significantly loses sharpness. However, iMovie lets you control the level of stabilization (and by extension sharpness loss) with a slider, and fortunately, you can tweak that setting on the fly. But in general, k eep in mind that what you gain in a steady picture, you lose in resolution.

 

Another big addition to iMovie ’09 is the Precision Editor, which lets you fine-tune the precise frame your edited clips begin and end on.

Why the need for such precision? Say you want to cut from a close-up of a batter hitting a ball to a wide shot of the same action, but you need the two shots to end and then begin exactly when the bat makes contact with the ball. In iMovie ’08, this kind of control was possible, but time-consuming. Now, you can roughly edit two clips together in iMovie’s project window, and then open the Precision Editor. Here, you’ll see a magnified view showing the edited and unused frames of the two clips, and can then drag the bar to quickly change both the end and start frames of just one or both of the two clips (Final Cut users know these as Ripple and Roll edits). You can also edit the start and end points of a clip’s audio, letting audio from one clip spillover into the next. If you’re quickly throwing together clips for casual home movies, you may never need the Precision Editor, but if you’re a perfectionist, you’ll definitely appreciate the control.

iMovie also makes it easier to wrangle all the media files you may be keeping on multiple hard drives. A new Consolidate Project feature will copy or move that media to whichever drive your project file is saved on, so all the files related to a project reside on one drive. We wish it offered a few more options for how to copy and move files around, and that it was also more intuitive to use--we actually had to look it up in the Help system, which is rare with Apple software. But we’re glad it’s there.

 

 

There are tons more useful new features in iMovie ’09. For instance, you can play a music track, and press the M key to place a marker on every beat of the music. Now, you can drag clips or photos to the music, and iMovie will start each element on a new beat. Another nice touch: If you’re shooting Star Wars fan movies or other special-effects extravaganzas that involve green screen footage, iMovie can key out the green from your shots. There’s also a unique map animation you can customize for travel videos. You can place an animated dot on a major city around the globe, and draw stylized lines between cities as well, creating a nice visual opener when your video moves to a new city. 

Apple clearly spent a lot of time on small details in iMovie ’09--making one missing feature all the more strange. It’s not possible to change audio volume within a clip over time (earlier iMovie versions called this Rubberbanding). You can fade audio at the beginning and end of clips, but if you want to raise and lower volume selectively throughout the clip, you have to manually cut it up into small segments, and then give each segment a different volume setting. This is a pretty clunky solution given all the other elegance found under iMovie’s hood. Still, it’s by no means a deal breaker for the vast majority of projects you’re likely to tackle with the app.