To say this program is frustrating is a gross understatement.
I agree, but it's not bad once you learn it.
All I wanted to do was take a SINGLE still image, place a simple audio clip overtop, and then manually create subtitles. The entire audio clip is 1 minute and 22 seconds long.
Subtitles are hopeless with iMovie. You can simulate them with captions (be sure to set the fade in/out to 0 seconds), but that's all.
Try chopping up the audio clip into smaller, discreet pieces: NO.
Click on the sound to highlight the box yellow (detach the audio first if necessary). Point the mouse to where you want to split, then right-click (or ctrl-click) and select "split". Note that the entire purple area must be boxed yellow, not just the lower half.
Adding in subtitles looked easy, but then they kept changing fonts and sizes. In front of my eyes!
I also output a copy that had conspicuously missing subtitles. Text I knew was there and then suddenly wasn't. I went back to iMovie and oh, that text is truly gone. When? I don't know. My fault, maybe but I don't think so. Oh wait, now that text over there is gone too.
Highlight the text you want to fix, then click the "show fonts" button. It will give you a full selection of system fonts, not just the 7 or 8 lame choices they push on us. Or, just use a rich-text editor like TextEdit, then copy-and-paste into iMovie. I always do this because iMovie often fails to save my captions too (perhaps because I use foreign characters), so I save the text files for backup.
And where is the save button? What about save-as? I want to make versions of my projects... and save as I go. Arrghhh!
Right-click on a project and select "duplicate" - that's all. It saves automatically when you quit (or maybe it keeps saving constantly?).
This doesn't even broach the topic that the output still quality was degraded to a very high extent (a full resolution, high quality image suddenly looked like a iPhone still)... but I wasn't about to re-try making this program work, because I think the bottom line is that it does not.
I always export using Quicktime (= big file), then use MPEG Streamclip or Handbrake to encode. Usually I'll make an mp4 with settings for multi-pass, deinterlace, and decomb. I get poor results with de-blocking filters, so I don't even bother with them.
Quicktime seems to have an insidious gamma problem, which I read probably occurs when
importing, so all movies look darker when you view them later. You can compensate slightly by increasing the brightness, but it's a terrible "solution".
So I'm looking for good alternatives too.
Me too.
