iMovie ‘08? A disaster.

You know that real easy editing tool from Apple called iMovie where you can put a movie together in minuets.  Well when they released iLife ‘08–the software suite with iPhoto, iWeb, iDVD, etc they redesigned iMovie with a new interface that is supposed to make creating movies easier. Unfortunately it’s horrible. Here sis David Pouge’s report from the NY Times. I completely agree with everything–”IMovie ‘08, on the other hand, has been totally misnamed. It’s not iMovie at all. In fact, it’s nothing like its predecessor and contains none of the same code or design. It’s designed for an utterly different task, and a lot of people are screaming bloody murder.

The new iMovie was, as Apple admits, designed primarily for throwing together movies quickly. It lets you scan through a clip to see what’s in it, isolate the good parts, and rapidly drop them into a sequence.

But iMovie 6 was just as good at those tasks; you could scrub through, chop and drag its clips just as easily. Meanwhile, iMovie ‘08 is incapable of the more sophisticated editing that the old iMovie made so enjoyable. The old iMovie offered the essential tools of professional programs like Final Cut Pro without the cost or complexity.

The new iMovie, for example, is probably the only video-editing program on the market with no timeline—no horizontal, scrolling strip that displays your clips laid end to end, with their lengths representing their durations. You have no indication of how many minutes into your movie you are.

The new iMovie gets a D for audio editing. You can choose one piece of music to put behind the video, but that’s it. You can’t manually adjust audio levels during a scene (for example, to make the music quieter when someone is speaking). You can’t extract the audio from a clip. The program creates a fade-out at the end of an audio clip, but you can’t control its length or curve.

All the old audio effects are gone, too. No pitch changing, high-pass and low-pass filters, or reverb.

The new iMovie doesn’t accept plug-ins, either. For years, I’ve relied on GeeThree.com’s iMovie plug-ins to achieve effects like picture-in-picture, bluescreen and subtitles. That’s all over now.

You can’t add chapter markers for use in iDVD, which is supposed to be integrated with iMovie. Bookmarks are gone. “Themes” are gone. You can no longer export only part of a movie.

All visual effects are gone—even basic options like slow motion, reverse motion, fast motion, and black-and-white. And you can’t have more than one project open at a time.

Incredibly, the new iMovie can’t even convert older iMovie projects. All you can import is the clips themselves. None of your transitions, titles, credits, music, or special effects are preserved.

On top of all that, this more limited iMovie has steep horsepower requirements that rule out most computers older than about two years old.

To be sure, the new version has some cool features. You can send a completed video to YouTube with one menu command; the color-correction and frame-cropping tools are unprecedented in a consumer program; and you can really, truly delete unwanted pieces of your clips, thus reclaiming hard drive space. (iMovie and Final Cut, on the other hand, preserve an entire 20-minute clip on your hard drive even if you’ve used only 3 seconds of it.)

It’s also worth pointing out that iMovie ‘08 creates titles, crossfades and color adjustments instantly. There’s no “rendering” time, as there is in Final Cut or the old iMovie. So you gain an exhilarating freedom to play, to fiddle with the timing and placement of things.

But honestly. To rephrase (and sanitize) the wailing on the discussion boards: What the [bleep]! What was Apple thinking?

Apple says that it was thinking: “It’s 1.0. We’ll bring it up to par with free software updates, like we always do.” Internally, I’m guessing that it was also thinking, “iMovie had gotten pretty old, and it was haunted by some intractable bugs.” And also, perhaps, “iMovie was getting so powerful, it was taking sales away from Final Cut.”

But it must also have been thinking, “Then again, it is a little embarrassing to take so many steps backward.”

That’s why, with what I imagine is a certain degree of sheepishness, the company is offering a free download of the previous iMovie version to anyone who has iMovie ‘08. In that regard, all the wailing is a bit overblown; Apple is not actually taking away the older version. The only real raw part of the deal is that people who pay $80 for a new software rev expect an enhanced version—not another copy of the old one.

I can’t remember any software company pulling a stunt like this before: throwing away a fully developed, mature, popular program and substituting a bare-bones, differently focused program under the same name.

I’ve used the real iMovie to edit my Times videos for three years now. The results are perfectly convincing as professional video blog work. But the new version is totally unusable for that purpose. It’s unusable, in fact, for anyone doing professional work that requires any degree of precision.

I can’t help thinking that Apple would have done better to call a spade a spade, and give the new program a different name. Call it FlyMovie, or ByeMovie, or WhyMovie.

But one thing’s for sure: it sure isn’t iMovie.”