iMovie is video-editing software. It grabs a copy of the raw footage on your camcorder
or camera and lets you edit it easily, quickly, and creatively.
That’s a big deal, because over the years, home movies have developed a bad name.
You know what it’s like watching other people’s camcorder footage. You’re captive on
some neighbor’s couch after dessert to witness 60 excruciating, unedited minutes of
a trip to Mexico, or 25 too many minutes of a baby wearing a spaghetti bowl.
Deep down, most people realize that the home-movie viewing experience could be
improved if the video were edited down to just the good parts. But until iMovie came
along, editing camcorder footage on a computer required several thousand dollars’
worth of digitizing cards, extremely complicated editing software, and the highesthorsepower
computer equipment available. Unless there was a paycheck involved,
editing footage under those circumstances just wasn’t worth it.
Then along came iMovie, the world’s least expensive version of what Hollywood
pros call nonlinear editing software. In the old days, your recorded footage sat on
a videotape, and you edited it in linear fashion—you rewound and fast-forwarded
through every frame of the tape to get to the parts you wanted. Nowadays, there’s no
rewinding or fast-forwarding; you jump instantly to any piece of footage you want as
you put your movie together.
The world of video is exploding. People give each other DVDs instead of greeting
cards. People watch each other via video on their websites. And some people
quit their daily-grind jobs to become videographers for hire, making money filming
weddings and creating living video scrapbooks. Video, in other words, is fast becoming
a new standard in communication for the new century.
If you have iMovie and a camera, you’ll be ready.