iMovie HD 5.0.1 Updater Released

[Lacero]

Apple needs an update for iPhoto next. The program is so buggy, crashes a lot in Photo Book mode.

 

[jacg]

Positive thoughts so far

Well I had iLife ordered with a ship date today. Predictably, Apple Store UK send me an email today saying "it's not coming today" (or something along those lines, perhaps because I ordered a shuffle as well) so I went to PCWorld and picked up iLife minus educational discount. (I'll try to cancel the other copy or send it back...)

Anyway. First impressions are excellent. iPhoto 5 is very fast (except when saving changes to edited photos), new features very neat.

iMovie was much faster when I loaded up an old iMovie 4 file - like using FCP at last. I did software update to 5.01 before I started. You can't 'share' projects which contain protected audio but no video; add some video and you're OK. Looks like I can still use my purchased music in my FCP projects.

iDVD is also more responsive. The new themes are interesting while being even more flexible than before. There's some serious time-saving to be had thanks to some sensible design by Apple.

Garageband 2: Notation is well presented. From an educational POV this is very interesting.

All in all, a very interesting evening's introduction to the new suite. And Edinburgh are beating the Blues at half time!

PS iTunes rocks. We all know that already. (but I'd like folders, and I've told Apple...)

 

[andysmith]

Apple needs an update for iPhoto next. The program is so buggy, crashes a lot in Photo Book mode.

I noticed that.
I've just installed it on my eMac, and it's fairly fast - but I'd noticed a couple of bugs. The first, like you say, is a crash when you click the 'add album' button - which happenes some of the time.
Also, when you open up a photo to view larger, and click through the thumbs at the top to change picture, it doesn't always update the preview - and you have to click back into organisation view to get it to work again.

 

[jemeinc]

Yeah, I guess Apple should apologize for not being perfect eh? 🙄 I'm sorry for the sarcasm, but after using it for the past several days, I'd hardly call iLife '05 an unfinished product.

There's been plenty of known issues with it... The early adapters were basically people who paid to be beta testers... It clearly wasn't a finely tuned, well oiled product... I think the criticism is fair...

 

[virus1]

Yeah, I guess Apple should apologize for not being perfect eh? 🙄 I'm sorry for the sarcasm, but after using it for the past several days, I'd hardly call iLife '05 an unfinished product.

I think we all agree that the new version of ilife is done in terms of new features and such, but this is proof that they didn't do nearly as much debugging as they should have.

 

[DrEwe]

being able to cut/copy/paste between projects (was that there before!?)

No that is new. before you had to memorize the clip number, navigate to the media folder, find and duplicate the clip then copy it to your active project. In fact, you could not even have 2 open projects at the same time if I recall correctly. This is a good new feature IMHO.

 

[billystlyes]

Apple needs an update for iPhoto next. The program is so buggy, crashes a lot in Photo Book mode.

I have not heard that. You are talking about the newest version?

 

[wwooden]

My prediction is that there will be a lot of these types of updates in the next few months for all the iLife apps as people write in about bugs in the programs. I think they added some features to the programs but didn't completely finish them.

My biggest annoyance is the Music Notation in GarageBand 2. It is very pointless to have this feature and not be able to print it off. I hope they add that soon without having to pay for another upgrade.

 

[autrefois]

Yeah, I guess Apple should apologize for not being perfect eh? 🙄

Yes, Apple should apologize. I believe audio and video synchronization is a somewhat important feature for a program such as iMovie, no?

Companies seem to think it's okay to release buggy products because they can always update them later. Economics over quality and customer satisfaction.

I think consumers should not have to pay for products companies KNOW have bugs, particularly if they affect the main functionality of the program. People with modem connections should not have to assume they're going to have to download a 2+ MB update so soon after the product is released. I assume other iLife updates will be forthcoming soon as well.

It's one thing when an obscure bug occurs on a very limited number of machines, which may not have been caught before release. It's another thing when it's a known issue that affects a number of machines. Sounds like it's been an ongoing problem for some people in iMovie, not some obscure thing that just popped up in iMovie HD. I feel that generally if you can't say "fixes a bug which in rare circumstances..." or something similar, then it's a problem that should have been fixed before release.

I'm not saying you or others have to share my point of view, but hopefully you can at least understand why people expect a product to work out of the box.

 

[Sweetfeld28]

thats great, but when is my Final Cut Express going to be updated? I can't complain too much though, since my Final Cut Pro was just updated to HD 4.5. 🙂

 

[Mechcozmo]

Sometimes it takes 10-15 seconds before it realizes I clicked on something, and that's on a 768MB 1.8Ghz iMac G5.

Get.More.RAM.

😛

RAM is always helpful when you are doing video editing. Always. 2 GB is nice to have if you do a lot of it.

And I guess iMovie has gotten faster since I last saw it... (FCE user here)

 

[Mechcozmo]

thats great, but when is my Final Cut Express going to be updated?

I wanna use .mp3 and .m4a files in my FCE projects, but I can't. In version 2.0. And I'm not all that happy about it because the .mp3 and .m4a work just fine when it isn't going to be played on an ultra high quality speaker system. And I can always reconnect the media to a higher quality song file that I reimport at a later time. Its a PITA.....

 

[aswitcher]

Yeah, I am finding iPhoto a bit too slow...hope to see an update along the lines of this iMovie one...

 

[Chip NoVaMac]

Not appearing in my updates, and did the check for updates from the app, any ideas?

 

[Platform]

This shows us how good apple is at getting bug's fixed really fast and hopfully they will continue like this 😀 😀 😛

 

[Rod Rod]

I was working on a movie project with imovie 4 when I got my hands on ilife05. I couldn't resist upgrading my imovie too, so I did. Everything was quite alright, but one audio clip changed its place after the update. it was an easy one to fix, but that shouldn't have happened anyway. I hope this update fixes that kind of things.

You're right; it's best to finish iMovie 4 projects in iMovie 4 rather than attempt to finish them in iMovie 5. In theory it shouldn't be a problem to open 4 stuff in 5 but in practice that's not the case.

Good lord - audio synchronization has been a problem since iMovie 2.0! (I've been using Final Cut ever since...) Oh well, better late than never...

I agree.

iMovie HD has been handling 5 1/2 hours of video in one project real well, and although my first impression (quick review when I installed it) found nothing significant to me added, in actual usage being able to cut/copy/paste between projects (was that there before!?) has been a Godsend. No crashes, but some major sluggishness. Sometimes it takes 10-15 seconds before it realizes I clicked on something, and that's on a 768MB 1.8Ghz iMac G5.

Thank you so much for the heads-up. I was wondering what iMovie's timeline limit was, and I'm glad to hear it can handle 5+ hours on its timeline (whereas FCP has a 4 hour limit). This is important to me because I have a program that was shot in HDV, which I need to online in the next couple of weeks.

I'm going to capture in iMovie, edit in Apple Intermediate Codec in FCP HD, and then export the final product, import it into iMovie and from there print to video (assuming iMovie recognizes the JVC HM-DH30000). If it doesn't I'll record 60 minute chunks back to tape with my HD10 (for full HDV archiving). The program is going to be distributed on DVD but I'd still like to save an HD print of it for future projection and possibly HD-DVD / Blu-Ray authoring.

I've tried the same thing now with the update and have a question:

Am I going to have to upgrade each and every project to work with 05?

It's best to finish your iMovie 4 projects in 4, and then start using iMovie 5 for your new projects.

http://www.danslagle.com/mac/iMovie/index.shtml

I read the advice on the above website. I consider it very authoritative.

I would also recommend FINISHING all you old projects first THEN starting new projects with iMovie HD. That or COPY the media folder from your old iMovie project to the new project folder.

Invizzible, the iMovie FAQ has a page dedicated to audio sync fixes.

iMovie was always better for SP (not LP) video and 16-bit (not 12-bit) sound. Its bad handling of LP and 12-bit isn't a bug, but Apple should probably have been more explicit about it all along.

 

[Rod Rod]

And while I'm posting on here, does anyone know how I can fix DVD's that were burned with this sync problem? The gap in time between the audio and video gets progressively worse as you go farther into the DVD. Starts out fine, and by the time you're an hour into the program, it looks like a 1950's Godzilla movie.

You might want to use an extraction tool like DVDxDV and save the resulting video file as DV and the audio as 48Khz 16-bit stereo. Maybe then the audio and video would match up in an iMovie timeline. I don't know for certain but it's worth a try. There's a free trial version of DVDxDV (it watermarks the video) so you can try that out to see if it does what you need.

 

[BillHarrison]

Update installed, 1.25ghz Mini, no problems so far. No changes either, as I have yet to use iMovie (just cant bring myself to do it with a dual 2.3ghz Athlon xp next to me, I am afraid I will be too dissapointed in performance)

Bill