Well, played with things for quite a bit at the apple store last night. iphoto and imovie were my big time wasters...
iphoto looks pretty much the same. Effectively Events are just a fancy name for Rolls. Not sure what to make of it yet. It saves space to have an event window you can just swipe over to see a sampling of the photos before you open the event. But if you named all your rolls well, and keep them all 'closed' you kind of have the same thing. This just looks prettier. The worst thing I noticed was it seemed harder to use keywords. They were still around, but no icon on the left for the list, and no editable list in the preferences. They're probably somewhere, they just jump out at me. I hope this doesn't mean they're on the way out...
Had to spend time on imove though, given all the talk here. Timeline and frame by frame granularity are definitely gone, as are most of your audio controls. I'm gonna finally have to learn how to use FCx correctly now
But, when I see in imovie 8 was a big wow. If this was the first time you had ever seen imovie it would knock your socks off. It's FAST. No more rendering time for anything. Swiping through your clips. As has been said, trimming your clip has lost frame resolution - you essentially get a bounding box and just drag an end until you hit your in or out point. You see the frames/move live while you drag the box, so you can hit your point close enough for regular folk use. I hate to say it, but most of the people aren't going to care if a clip ends at frame 23 or frame 24. They just want to stop the clip before uncle joe walked in front of the camera.
Transition choices are smaller, but lets face it, most of the time I used crossfade fade in/out, or push. The others were nice for something special, but I didn't use them. Again, no rendering time - available instantly. They even show up as you 'wipe' across clips.
Titles seemed kind of cool. They sit 'above' the clips, so they can easily span clips (almost like their own title track). Want it longer or shorter? Just drag an end. Again, no rendering time - it just happens. That was cool.
I didn't play with the audio at all, but it seemed dumbed down - like you get to add one piece of music and be happy. No clue if you can change volume on individual clip - I can certainly see different clips having certain inherent volumes, and no way to normalize across your movie.
Big wow factor having everything instantly happen. Just like itunes and iphoto, you don't open projects any more. All your clips and all your movies are always there in the left column. Handy as you don't have to drag clips project to project any more. But movies are 'something bigger' and I'm not sure how this will work in the long run.
I think Apple is trying to keep all the i products at the same consumer level. Just like iphoto is good, but you need photoshop or aperture to do "real work", imovie has fallen into step with this. the current imovie will be great for most of the world to put birthday or vacation movies together quickly and have something really cool to use. "real work" is left to FCx (or your favorite tool) that will let you make real movie type clips. Just like you wouldn't use the iphoto editor for photos you're sending to a gallery, imovie 08 won't be the product to make anything fancier than a vacation movie or your student film.
While they're giving away imovie06 now so all our old movies aren't screwed big time, I really don't see them putting many advanced features "back in" to 08. Maybe better audio control, but no timeline or frame by frame editing capability. I just can't it fitting into where they are going. (Haven't tried to pull imovie06 things into FCx - maybe a project for this weekend).
Hope this helped a bit.
