iMovie 4+

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 use this software all the time when it comes to creating videos and so far everything is going great. However, I have a few suggestions for improvement of this app that it really needs. First of all, why do the movies have to take up so much space? And second of all, why are there extra black bars on the screen that plays my video in square shaped like seriously. Why does it have to play the videos in a smaller screen?! This is something that is really bothering me and I hope there will be a solution to this ASAP! Apple, please make iMovie not alter the size of the screen of the original video clip and please remove those extra black bars above and below the video clip as well as the ones on the sides please!!! I want to play my videos on a big enough screen and iMovie ruined it with those extra black bars so PLEASE REMOVE THEM AND STOP MAKING IMOVIE ALTER THE SCREEN OF THE ORIGINAL VIDEO CLIPS PLEASE!!!! FIX THIS ISSUE RIGHT NOW ASAP PLEASE!!!!!

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.