My husband and I are YouTubers who like to put out a professional product but don't yet have money in the budget for a professional movie editing program. We have found iMovie to be a very good product for the price! We're actually amazed at being able to combine multiple video and audio tracks together, do various transitions, change the speed of clips, crop, use filters, etc. There really is so much you can do, and I'm learning new tricks all the time to improve my videos. The frustrations I have with this program, first and foremost--the "Titles" are very limited. I find myself constantly tweaking the few options that are there to "kind of" do what I want, and there are such limited places and styles to overlay text on a clip. I would also love to be able to include other animated graphics, such as moving arrows or circling an object. And finally, exporting videos is excruciatingly slow and requires so much hard drive space! I have had to connect a bootable external hard drive to my Macbook just for iMovie use, since I've started shooting in 5K .If these issues could be resolved, I would honestly not ever have need for a "professional" movie program, and would give this a resounding 5 stars.

I have accomplished a lot with iMovie, but have now outgrown it. It performs well and almost never crashes. UX is clunky in places. Example, placing objects on the timeline has some strange limitations about how they attach. Captions are extremely limited, as you are stuck with their formats and screen placement. Cropping features are good. Audio overlays work pretty well. I don’t use it for any special effects, so no opinion there. Recently I had a freelancer do some work in iMovie. He had a newer version (by only one point release) and so project files were useless until I do a MacOS upgrade. Kind of frustrating as my current is not that old. Some freelancers do not use iMovie, so that limits the talent pool. I will be upgrading to Final Cut Pro this weekend to better address my business needs. It remains to be seen if and how current projects in iMovie will port over to FCP. And, of course, it is free with the Mac. So overall, I am satisfied.

I’ve been using Apple’s resident video software since iMovie 9. I make (or made, to be more accurate) a lot of short videos for classroom presentations. A LOT. Like hundreds and hundreds of them over the past decade. I loved using iMovie 9. Inserting text was easy, inserting cuts and transitions was easy, precision editing was easy, and the stacked timeline view was very, very helpful. Even though I upgraded my OS a couple times, I continued using iMovie 9 rather than whichever new version of iMovie Apple was inserting into its upgrades. Now, however, I can’t do that, because iMovie 9.0.9 washes all the color out of videos that are imported or re-used for another project. I suspect this was deliberate. So now I’m stuck with iMovie 10.x. This is a terrible, terrible “update.” Counter-inuitive, needlessly clunky, not at all user-friendly. It can’t even find all the videos I’ve already created on its own — it requires a janky process of teaching the thing where to find iMovie projects. Simply ridiculous. It’s as if the design/development team set itself to the task of finding the greatest number of ways they could force otherwise loyal iMovie users to have to relearn everything they’d already learned about video editing. So now, even though I need to make far fewer videos for classes, I’m at the point of frustration with this software that I’m going to drop a couple hundred dollars on REAL video editing software and strip this kludge out of my system once and for all.

New problem to this update, I cannot import any MTS files. It trys to import them as .mov files but they are not, they are AVCHD .MTS files. iMovie crashes every time I try to stop the import which isn’t working. I did a test to see if I have corrupt Sd card or camera isn’t writing files properly but that is not the case. I use iMovie all the time for years and just updated, but also updated to High Sierra as well. Could be a problem of the two together. My iMac is the newest version as well, two months old. My Camera is Panasonic HC-X920, pretty darn good camera, defineatly an apple issue after the update. Please Fix this issue, iMovie is useless if it can’t import AVCHD files. Love the program when it works! One star for this only…….APPLECARE had me uninstall "Perian and MacFUSE" from the system preferences pane, and also do a “Command, Option P, R, reset on startup(Hold all these keys on Startup until you hear the sound or the screen flashes. Solved the issue. Pretty common apparently.