My iMovie Debut

By Chris Taylor

It was impossible to spend millennium eve in Times Square without wanting to make a movie of it. How often are you going to get 2 million extras--not to mention more cops than an episode of NYPD Blue--to assemble for free? Having landed an assignment to be one of the guys who dropped confetti at midnight from the roofs along Broadway, I couldn't resist bringing a digital camcorder along for the ride. Neither could my friend Bill, a reporter at the New York Daily News, who was working the crowds with digicam in hand. I figured our combined footage--half shot from above the party, half from inside it--ought to be worth something. I decided to turn it into an iMovie.

In case you missed the news, iMovie is the do-it-yourself video-editing program that comes bundled with Apple's high-end iMac DV. Since Steve Jobs decided, not unreasonably, that home digital video is going to be as big as desktop publishing, Apple has been cramming its website and its TV ads with homespun iMovies from kids and such celebs as John Cleese and Gregory Hines. All rave about how easy the software's editing process is. They're mostly right. Your footage, when you download it from the camera, arrives presliced in bite-size clips based on where you started and stopped filming. Crop each clip, change the running order, and you're on your way to Hollywood, baby.

But don't write your Oscar-acceptance speech just yet. The iMovie software is designed to let you dabble in an amateurish fashion. It's fine if you want to make Budweiser commercials; less so if you want to make Battleship Potemkin. Try to deal with more than 20 min. of clips in a file, and iMovie chokes. At least that was my experience during the making of Carnival 2000.

Carnival 2000, by Britpop group Prefab Sprout, was the music I chose for my sound track. It clocks in at less than 4 min.--short enough, I thought, for me to go mad with tons of MTV-style quick cuts spliced together with the professional-looking transitions (such as fade-in and cross-dissolve) that iMovie provides.

Big mistake. By the time I loaded Bill's footage into iMovie--a total of about 150 unique clips--I had lost control. There was no way to search for a particular slice of the action, and the clips themselves were starting to freak out on me. Some bits I thought I had cut would resurrect themselves on the clip palette. Others would go black, disappear or simply refuse to play, feigning lack of memory.

I called some Apple iMovie execs, who said mine was the first such bug report they'd had. They did, however, recommend that iMovies not be longer than about 40 clips. If I was beyond that stage, they suggested, I should get Final Cut Pro, professional editing software that costs $999 and currently runs only on a top-of-the-line PowerMac G4.

Why would Apple whet the appetite of millions of budding armchair directors, only to require a massive infusion of cash and equipment just when things start to get interesting? Maybe Jobs can devise some midrange software that will at least let you run searches on your clip file. In the meantime, I'm ready to start boring my friends and family with Carnival 2000--scaled down, less like a music video, but finished nonetheless. Let's hope those extras don't start demanding back pay.

Catch those celebrity-made iMovies at apple.com/imovie Queries or three-picture deals for Chris? E-mail him at [email protected]