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.

My first macbook this year! I was so excited having already invested in much of the apple market and wanted to finish it off. I was utilizing garage band on my other devices, partnered with another program to edit on that was slightly easier on my PC. I also loved utilizing imovie on my iPad. So it was a natural progression that when I needed to invest in a new computer, I would go with Mac. I loved imovie on the ipad, and the transition to my mac was easy (unlike garage band which the programs were not utilized the same). Movies for work, for personal blogging, and for fun was easy to do using imovie. Upon the most recent update (10.1.7), however, it is impossible to create a movie as the app crashes upon opening. Call me impatient for a new bug fix release (as the update just occured). but it is kind of important that things work as they are supposed to when I need them to. That’s what we expect from Mac/apple, right? Seamless integration, effectiveness, productivity, etc… can’t be productive if the app doesn’t work. :(. Wil update my review when apple fixes this issue. :)

As soon as I begin to create videos of any real length over a minute or two, iMovie chokes completely. I recorded about an hour of 1080p video with my Sony video camera, imported it to my Mac and tried to edit down to about 10 min. I wasted days letting it process my video files which Windows Movie Maker had 0 issues with in the past. The first thing I noticed is the temp files wiped out about 100gb of space on my drive to store temporary data.When editing for even a minute or so the spinning wheel would begin again. I’d literally fall asleep watching it. My Macbook is mid 2015 model with the video all on an SSD drive and 8GB ram. I made sure it had plenty of memory and CPU available. After weeks of wasting my time with iMovie, I finally started from scratch on my 2011 Windows PC with non SSD hard drive, using the old Windows Movie Maker software. Within about 2 hours time I had somethng that could be published. My expensive Mac was crushed by my old cheap PC with the free Movie Maker software from Microsoft, in the department Apple use to be known by - Video. My how have times changed. I spoke to customer support, they asked for details of the video files. It was noted. Weeks later I’ve heard no response.