iMovie '09 looks good

I have Final Cut Studio but there's never enough time to build movies to the standards I set for myself. iMovie '08 was a huge step-down from iMovie HD but now it seems the people at Apple are putting something right. Having watched the guided tour I'm looking forward to purchasing iLife '09.

Edited by deleted (Tue 06-Jan-09 20:29:32)

Video stabilisation is a biggie, I've used a helmet camera to record video while on a mountain bike but it's been too shaky. This new release will help.

If you watched the keynote, you may have noted that the stabilisation process is two-step. The first one is a lengthy pre-processing of all the frames which had been done prior to the live demo. The second step was the only one that was demo'ed on stage, when the movie was rendered using that pre-prepared motion info. It will be interesting to see what FPS performance is achieved in real life, on a real Mac, for that first phase.

Anything like that will always be CPU intensive. I could always run it on the Mac Pro if needed.

I haven't tried it yet ofcourse but based on the demo this update puts iMovie back on the map. I'm quite pleased Apple paid some attention to Mac software.

They need some wow factor, iPhone is starting to get boring, people want some basic features of other phones and Apple isn't interested.

Snow Leopard will be a bit of a letdown for some people. It's nice that it's faster and leaner, but people do like features.

Time to concentrate on software i think - at least I'm hoping Apple will have designed Logic, Final Cut, Aperture and iLife to utilise the benefits of Snow Leopard.

but people do like features.

The last thing I want is for Apple to get sucked down the MS bloatware route.

True, but if your new OS is the same as the old one with a slightly different look then you feel cheated.

They need to look at memory limits, not sure about Photoshop CS4, but CS3 hit the 32-bit limit and there was no way around it. Some people work on huge images.