fun with iMovie

The most succinct result I can give is: horsepower helps. It’s amazingly simple to do stuff like titles, music tracks, transitions, but boy, is it CPU-intensive. I am doing all this on a 500 MHz iMac DV, and I have run into multi-hour render and export jobs. Rendering titles is very well-done: the renderer takes a long time but it doesn’t bog down the machine at all. Exporting is just brutal. I am pulling a load of 6-8, with no other processes running.

The only feature I can think of to add is an estimate of disk space as well as of time to complete. If you’re trying to scale something to fit on a CD, it would help.

For example, I have a 19 minute project that takes about 140 minutes to export as a quicktime movie: it would help to know how big it will be so I can see if I’m wasting my time or not. If it’s too big for a single CD, I’ll need to work on it some more.

Update: The movie came in at 460 Mb or so, so it was fine for a CD.

The camera worked fine, though I think it came with a flaky firewire cable: I swapped one of my own in and it seemed to work better. The symptom was dropouts and extra clips: I had to extract the video a couple of times and would get different numbers of clips.

Firewire itself is very nice: I love a standard that more than one company supports. You drive the camera from the computer as soon as it’s detected, so you never need to touch it after that.