iShite ‘08
Saturday, October 20th, 2007I’ve been pretty positive in previous posts about OS X and my Apple experience in general… but now let me point out that the new iLife suite, specifically iMovie and iPhoto, is so broken as to be nearly useless to me. iMovie’s new skimming [scrubbing] feature is great but, er, not worth discarding almost every other feature expected in a video editor (even a free one). iPhoto has a similar skimmy feature which does make it easier to quickly browse for things visually, but iPhoto still runs so badly that I avoid using it wherever possible.
Also, considering that Apple is usually seen as the industry leader in modern GUI design, it can be pretty frustrating discovering what doesn’t work. A case in point, I recently shot some video on my Canon IXUS and wanted to edit in in iMovie, and this is pretty much how it went:
- Connect camera to MacBook
- Wait patiently for iPhoto to go take a shit and a shower
- Select "Import all"
- Study the activity monitor and wonder why each photo/short video seems to take minutes to import
- Bravely select "delete all from camera" once import is done
- Open iMovie
- Ponder how the hell you’re going to get that movie from iPhoto into iMovie
- Notice a button with an icon shaped like a still camera, and realize that this opens a browser into the iPhoto library
- Browse to the "event" recently imported, to discover that only still photos are showing up, not the videos
- Sigh in exasperation
- Note that in the collections pane there is an icon marked "iPhoto videos" and click that
- It says there are no items
- see 10
- Switch to iPhoto and drag the clip from iPhoto onto iMovie
- Movie clip sproings harmlessly back whence it came
- see 10
- Repeat steps 14-16 several times choosing different target panes to no avail, until swearing occurs
- Select "import movies" in iMovie file menu
- Browse to iPhoto library in home folder, to discover that it is not browseable/expandable from within iMovie
- see 10
- Close both iMovie and iPhoto
- Run Parallels, launch WindowsXP
- Run Windows Movie Maker, of all things
- Select import movies, browse to shared OSX home folder, into [now browsable] iPhoto library and find the avi you imported in step 3
- Perform minimal editing task and export compressed movie for upload
On top of this frustration of accessing videos from iPhoto, iMovie ‘08 dispenses with all video effects except for color adjustment and cropping. This means you can’t mirror or change speed of playback of a clip. Without the ability to control frame rate/playback of a clip a video editor is useless to me, since I shoot at 15/30/60fps a lot and need to be able to manipulate this for playback. No distortion effects, no cheap fog and rain effects, no nothing! To make up for this obvious deficiency you can now go to Apple and download iMovie 06 for free… but what kind of solution is that? Can you imagine how much people would trash Microsoft if they released a sexified version of Word which actually removed half the standard features, then told people it was ok they could just use the old version when they needed those…?
In my day to day computing I’m surprised to find myself drifting back towards Windows, even for web browsing, so it’s lucky that Macs can run both OS’s now. OSes. OSs. Oh-Esses. Windows apps are always less sexy but they are often more general purpose. Mac apps are great for helping Steve Jobs show off but they don’t necessarily make your life easier.
And no, I am not interested in trying Feisty Fawn Ubuntu or whatever it’s called… I don’t need yet another operating system.
October 21st, 2007 at 4:50 am
If it wasn’t embarrassing enough to use Ubuntu: now it’s “gusty gibbon”.
still more honest then the usual car/os/energy-beverage nomenclature of “FLAMING JAGUAR OV DETH”.
October 21st, 2007 at 12:30 pm
here are my 2c (tips)
don’t use iphoto, everyone know’s it’a friggin dog’s breakfast. and imovie is not much better.
import jpg and avi files using the simple but reliable “Image capture”. You can set it to launch instead of iphoto. (change within Image capture’s prefs).
nothing is better than manual control in any operating system :)
delete from camera using the IXUS, not software.
if you need icon previews, i highly recommend cocoathumbs which can easily handle 80000+ files
and use the Finder (in icon view) to find stuff.
edit in photoshop :)
i don’t think iMovie natively supports avi files from the IXUS.
October 26th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
Mark, I like to see objective comparisons between mac/win os, but do you think there’s an element of muscle memory work arounds happening here that just don’t exist yet for you in osx?
October 26th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
for instance, it would never occur to me to plug my dslr into my vaio to export the images. I remove the card and put it in a usb/CF reader. effortless seeing as i have managed out the “use the canon software, connect camera to pc, export to an always useless to me location” process
October 26th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
Apple have pushed the “it just works” idea pretty successfully, so this post is intended as a sort of antidote to that.
Also drag’n'drop is a pretty fundamental part of the whole desktop paradigm, and I am really surprised at how much it doesn’t seem to work in iLife. eg isn’t it perfectly reasonable for me to expect that I could drag a photo from iPhoto to another application, or at least onto the desktop?
October 26th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
you’re right of course about the desktop paradigm, but the implementation is usually a compromise, at best, of the original design. and if you’re using iPhoto in ‘explore photos’ mode, then yes you should be able to drag to a location/application, but in ‘photo editor’ mode i wouldn’t expect it to work (i’ve not used iPhoto so am unsure of it’s functional range)
October 26th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
i work for a software company and there’s a continual disparity between sales (aka Mr Jobs) and Product Team (those actually working in the muddy trenches of code)
November 7th, 2007 at 7:03 am
I have a new MacBook and there’s a button in the right menu of iMovie that lists all videos in iPhoto.
March 27th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Just bought a new macbook pro and i’m playing with os/x for the first time. Heard good stuff about iMovie so i though, let’s edit a small movie i made with my iXus. In Vista, i just open it with Movie Maker or something else, edit and save. No prob. But it just doesn’t work in iMovie. So, my experience is pretty much the same? Why doesn’t it just work like it did in Vista? The iXus is a popular camera used by many, many people!