I used to be part of a video iTunes thingy called BlockStack TV (www.blockstack.tv although I don’t think this URL works anymore). We used this Corel package at the start for video editing. It was ok and really easy but crashed all the time. Very annoying as it usually did this just as we thought we were finished like all crap software leaving us holding our collective pencils and wanting to Johnny Wilkinson the laptop.
We moved to something a bit more pro and used a questionably acquired copy of Adobe Premiere. That was pretty swishy and has load of cool features we had no clue about. Still after a weekend of tinkering we were glueing bits of video together in a remedial way. It was doing the job.
Now… I have a Mac. I’m a full blown Apple convert with all the trimmins. This comes with iMovie for free so I thought it best to go with the free option after spending stupid money on this Macbook. Now the question was simple, how hard was it to make basic videos with iMovie as I didn’t want to spend too much time figuring it out.
I actually found it difficult to start and I think that was because I expected it to be difficult. I did it to myself. In fact it was so easy I was looking for headaches where their weren’t any. Dropping in videos was simple, ordering them and cropping was just drag and drop and added credits or words over the top was generally simple. I did google one thing and that was how to put some text over other video. That actually brought me to Apple’s help and not some independent site so I had to credit apple there again.
Generally it was great. I wish I’d used it earlier but hey, here we are. The one problem I ran into and I haven’t solved yet is iMovie’s ability to auto-upload to various places like Youtube. I tried this feature and it spent a long time showing me a small circular icon in the corner which I could click on to get a slightly large status telling me this was uploading. After about 1.5 hours it was still going so I checked my Youtube account to see what it thought about the matter. It said the upload had been cancelled. Right…. yet iMovie still thought we were all good. Shortly after this iMovie hung and I had to kill it.
Lesson learned. I exported it to an mp4 file and uploaded using Youtube. I think iMovie might work for tiny videos but it lost the plot with a 7min 500MB video file. Otherwise I’d suggest iMovie is a winner for basic bloggy style videos.
