The uber geeks

iMovie needs multi-movie features

In 2003 I recorded a going-away party that lasted several hours and had multiple parts to it. I had recorded it on DV-tape, imported it onto my external hard drive, and not touched it for a few years.

The going-away party was for some friends who went to Peru to do some missionary work and this past month they visited the area. Being that they wanted a copy of the video I got to work in iMovie cutting up the hours of footage to prepare it for DVD.

iMovie is extremely simple to use and definitely built for the home-user in mind, yet I find it lacking when you want to split up a long video into separate parts for use on DVD.

I had nearly 19GB worth of video and the only way I could figure out how to compile the video into two separate sections was to create a copy of the project file and have it only contain the clips of the respective sections within each project. So a 19GB project immediately became a 40GB project and me having to open each project file separately. Very annoying.

I think iMovie needs a way to separate a long video into sections, each section having its own timeline.

Secondly, iMovie needs some help in the “synergy with iDVD department”. The “send to iDVD” feature, while neat, doesn’t work as expected in a multi-movie project. Each time that you use this feature in iMovie - iDVD asks to open a new project file. So the only way to import multiple iMovie-edited videos into iDVD is to open iDVD and import them manually. My irritations with iDVD will be written up at a later date.

I look forward to the next release of iMovie where hopefully this problem, and many others that I plan on writing up, will be addressed.

Also posted here.

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