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My Journey With Video Apps: iMovie

Developer: Apple

Cost: Free

App Overview (from iTunes): With a streamlined design and intuitive Multi-Touch gestures, iMovie lets you enjoy your videos and tell stories like never before. Browse your video library, share favorite moments, create beautiful movies, and watch them on all your devices in iMovie Theater. And with the iMovie extension, it’s fast and fun to make every video more memorable — right in the Photos app.

What I Like: This app also lets you have multiple projects like Clips. It allows on the timeline a mixture of both portrait and landscape videos and photos. The auto ducking audio feature is great and you can choose which clips you want audio from and don’t. The fade in and out is great and sharing is very easy. The adding a filter to the entire project or to select clips is really cool. Also being able to overlay video on top and/or create a picture and picture effect is very nice.

 

 

What I Don’t Like: The title tool is rudimentary and not easy to use right off the bat to make it do what you want. There’s no transition function on overlay clips. The speed function within the app to slow down/speed up clips is not very good. Trailer function doesn’t work well if you don’t have the right set ups. It just looks weird.

What I Think is Special About the App: This is a highly robust app that had more bells and whistles than I really expected. It’s the closest thing to a full pro video app I’ve seen on mobile, and can make things super complicated if you aren’t careful. It’s missing some key functionality to make it truly pro, but what you get for free is quite impressive.

 

 

Sample movie:

 

What is Our Future With Apple?

First, a disclaimer, I’m an Apple fan boy. Always have been. I’ve used an Apple computer since I was in elementary school when they allowed each classroom a day with the computer playing Oregon Trail. Now, that’s going way back. Ever since then, I’ve been more comfortable doing whatever I needed to do with a computer on a MacIntosh. In fact, I’m typing this post on an iMac. Maybe, a bit of overkill, but it gets the job done.

Macs are made for the creatives.

7158_1477725337When I started my career in television and video, everyone said that since I was a creative, that’s what having a Mac was best for. Creating video, doing animation, doctoring photos, etc. everyone assumed I used a Mac because I was in the creative field. They weren’t wrong, completely. I, and everyone, I worked with and my colleagues who were doing creative work was using a Mac. When Apple started developing professional video software like Final Cut Pro, it just seemed that I was destined to continue using this company that not only supported software in which I made my living, but also the hardware. I continued using Macs for when I started my business and the immense amount of software they developed. So even administratively, I switched to using their productivity apps and iCloud to run business.

 

So, when they developed for mobile, my staff went with iPhones, because of the ubiquity of the device to plug into our ecosystem. Even at home I have two Macs and 2 AppleTVs. It just seemed natural. I felt that I was on a roll with a company that has been a part of my success and growth for the past 20 years. I bought into their changes and upgrades and enjoyed the advancements in technology that has help ushered major changes in my industry over the last 10 years.

The confusing keynote

Then the last keynote came out. And it hit me. Is Apple, the company I know and loved changing enough that it is phasing itself out of what we are doing? I sat and thought about that for a minute. It hasn’t really upgraded any of its desktop hardware in years. We haven’t yet upgraded to the last two iterations of the OS due to legacy software that we still use. This is weird. The new keynote didn’t go into any new hardware upgrades aside from the laptop, and I’m not interested in that as a main editing machine. The highlight was the the reference to a new Final Cut update. That’s great, but what about machines to put around that new interface? I was dumbfounded. Do I have to look to another platform to continue on what we have built? Administratively, that’s easy. The Google platform would be easy to transition to. As well as the Pixel is an interesting mobile device. Creatively, I know Adobe makes software that is cross platform, but do we really want to support a Windows 10 environment? I don’t know how to troubleshoot that one as well as the Mac.

There are a lot of questions that need to be answered when we decide to do a full upgrade of our systems next year. Let’s hope that in those 12 months Apple has some better answers and solutions for going forward.

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