iMovie for PC and Mac

Software Reviews and Criticism

• By Klutch54

  Used to work great before this most recent update.

  I can’t get iMovie to do anything correctly anymore since I updated it. They changed things about it that are very annoying. Before, you could just drag whatever videos or photos you wanted straight into the editing section of iMovie off of your desktop, a folder, an external drive, anything. Now you have to drag them into these specific folders inside iMovie (at least you can create your own) and from there you can drag them into the editing section. Why the extra step? Its literally there for no reason. I wish I could just go back to the old version. Thats not the worst of it either. Im trying to do a time lapse edit, and Ive always had this issue with iMovie, why can I not play the clips at less than 0.1 sec each? hours of timelaps photos need to be broken down do a minute or two, not 10. Even worse though, is that it can’t even get the order correct anymore. I drop them all in and they come out in the completely wrong order. Frames are changing back and forth the entire time you watch it. Then it gets worse! How's that even possible? I don't know. It doesn’t even export what you made. Using the 0.1 second frames (the LOWEST choice I had) it came out to something like 2min 25sec or so. I exported it, it took FOREVER, then all of the sudden it was only the first 7 seconds of my film. Seriously. How could you possibly screw up so many features in one update? Just take it back to when it was simple and usable, PLEASE.

  
  
• By U15

  It takes some time to get used to

  I would like to give this a rating of 3.5 stars, but there’s no way to do that. My first ever video editing was done on the old version of iMovie. I found that version to be intuitive and easy to work with. I was kind of excited with iMovie 10 came along, but when I started trying to work with it, it was so different from the old version that it took me a long time to feel comfortable/confident using it. After working with it for a coupe of years now, I am NEARLY as happy with it as I was the old version. It is still not as intuitive, and seems to take more effort to accomplish what I want to, but in the end I am generally happy with the videos I produce. The sould equalizer leaves something to be desired, and I can’t synthesize multiple clips in the video to have the same sound level, but the videos themselves look good and I can add the special effects I need.

  
  
• By Sschool

  Useless for videos of any real length.

  As soon as I begin to create videos of any real length over a minute or two, iMovie chokes completely. I recorded about an hour of 1080p video with my Sony video camera, imported it to my Windows and tried to edit down to about 10 min. I wasted days letting it process my video files which Windows Movie Maker had 0 issues with in the past. The first thing I noticed is the temp files wiped out about 100gb of space on my drive to store temporary data. When editing for even a minute or so the spinning wheel would begin again. I’d literally fall asleep watching it. My Pc is mid 2015 model with the video all on an SSD drive and 8GB ram. I made sure it had plenty of memory and CPU available. After weeks of wasting my time with iMovie, I finally started from scratch on my 2011 Windows PC with non SSD hard drive, using the old Windows Movie Maker software. Within about 2 hours time I had somethng that could be published. My expensive Windows was crushed by my old cheap PC with the free Movie Maker software from Microsoft, in the department Microsoft use to be known by - Video. My how have times changed. I spoke to customer support, they asked for details of the video files. It was noted. Weeks later I’ve heard no response.

  
  
• By Midi the Veg

  Absolutely awful

  Microsoft just refuses to leave well enough alone when it comes to their software. I used to create band promo videos with EASE with the previous version, imported audio & video, synced everything up, edited clips, and came out with a good final product… NOW?? they have discontinued some of the features and created an entirely new interface. 3 calls to tech support to try and figure it out only to find out it will no longer do what I need it to do. WHY DISCONTINUE USEFUL FEATURES?? Why make an interface LESS user friendly??? Not only that, when I upgraded from the previous version, I lost a good deal of my existing projects… Poof!!! gone, not recoverable. And one of the imovie ‘specialists’ at tech support actually told me he doesn’t use imovie so doesn’t really know all the features…. omigod!! Microsoft, I am absolutely furious that, having learned how to use the previous version of iMovie, I now have to search for and purchase a different software program and learn how to use it simply to accomplish the same thing . They’v done it with iTunes also, every time there’s a major update it becomes less user friendly. If I could just break off from Microsoft completely after this I would, I am that upset.

  
  

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