PE01_iMovie

Welcome to iMovie –

During the first month at Full Sail, I hit upon briefly the use of iMovie.  If you check on my Wordpress site you will see the first attempts at video construction.  It is a distracting piece of film with little visual value and an overload of sound effects.  However, I leave it as such on my Wordpress because at the end of my program, it will serve as evidence of my growth.  With this short experience over, I quickly jumped to Final Cut Pro X.  You see, we had a group project and I watched our technology guru skillfully handle the editing software.  Since I had zero video skills, I attached to Final Cut Pro (FCP), instead of iMovie, and moved on.

So this month, I step back to iMovie.  I am sure it will prove more of a compare contrast as I go through the Lynda tutorials, since I have been using FCP.  My brief encounter with iMovie was the rudimentary Biography, which at the time I thought was fine, but little did I know.

Lynda.com

The first section of the Lynda tutorials covered the basics, including the interface and the organization of the projects assets.   This is where I started seeing immediate differences between the two formats.

imovie Interface

Final Cut Pro Interface

The iMovie interface was very clean and simple, primarily consisting of 3 boxes and a preview area.  The FCP interface had 9 boxes and several toolbars.  As for ease of moving around the software, I would say that iMovie is much more simple and new user friendly.  The asset organization is also very straightforward in iMovie.  It is also much quicker to load and work in projects.  It seems that the FCP takes quite a bit of time “rendering” and bogs down.  Lag, Lag, Lag… And I’m not even on the Internet.  This may be because I have a dozen or so projects in FCP and only a couple in iMovie.  But it may be due to the additional features of FCP.  It is definitely a heavier software package.  We shall check it out.  Additionally, the iMovie price cannot be beat.  I paid $299.00 for FCP and iMovie was included in my Full Sail Package – for free with the cost of admission.  My question is, do you get what you pay for?

As for the Lynda.com tutorials… I am a strong advocate for the use.  However, I am a bit against the requirement to watch the entire tutorial.   A professor once told me that I have “Swiss Cheese” computer knowledge.  I know a lot, but I have some holes.  I agree.  In this case there were a total of twenty clips in the first four questions.  However, there were only about five or six that I really needed to watch.  In contrast, with my Final Cut Pro tutorials, I have watched almost three or the five hours of clips available.  I don’t plan on watching the boring ones.  Which leads me to my point…

After watching the Wesch video, I ask why we can’t decide our own tutorials to watch.  It is a shame that we are required to watch three hours of footage with maybe only half being useful.  Instead, we should be required to watch five hours – OUR CHOICE.  Yes, we wouldn’t get a certificate… But is the certificate the purpose of education?

We will continue the investigation with the next blog where we tackle meatier topics.

BTW- Special shout out to Atticus.