iMovie 08: from timeline to storyboard -a new paradigm!
Having spend a bit over an hour on a new iMac playing with iMovie 08, here are some first impressions -
Dazzling images, absolutely dazzling. It's hard to look past the sharpness,
clarity, just plain breathtaking 'look' of the images -- all HD, all in 16:9
widescreen format.
At the same time, impressed with the 'look' of the screen -- it was one of the
big iMacs, as it happened -- I was puzzled by the layout. I knew it wasn't
the 'old' iMovie; I'd seen the tutorials, read the manual, but it was still odd
to see it 'look' so different. I kept looking for the timeline, and there isn't
one. And for anybody who has spent any time with any movie editing program, the absence of a timeline is a jolt. Even as I played with the clips in the iMovie Project window, the one on the upper left, learning how to move them, re-arrange them (hint: select, then click and drag), learning how to trim them (hint: click on the little teeny icon on the bottom left of the frame, and a
trim window opens), it didn't drawn on me what Apple -- or the mysterious
engineer who went scuba diving and then was inspired to re-invent iMovie -- had done. I'm almost embarassed to admit, I'd been playing with the clips in the Project window for ten or fifteen mintues when it dawned on me!
They had change the paradigm!
No longer is iMovie based on the idea of a timeline. Now, with iMovie 08, the model is the storyboard.
Let me explain what I mean.
There are essentially two fundamental ways to organize your clips. One is the
time-honored 'timeline', in which you arrange your clips along a line, a
timeline, from left to right.
The other way to organize your story, now almost universally done, in
movies, in TV productions, in full length animations, is the 'story-board'.
With a 'story-board' approach, originally you created a series of sketches of
something representative of each scene, then you move them around until they told the story you want to tell. You could arrange them choronogically, from beginning to end; you could arrange them with an ending clip first, then
'flashback' to tell the story; you could arrange them in whatever order that best teold the story that you wanted to tell.
Once it hit me, that the essence of what Apple has done is change the paradigm, everything else began to fall into place.
Hal
PS: Scrubbing is now called 'skimming'. 😉
Dazzling images, absolutely dazzling. It's hard to look past the sharpness,
clarity, just plain breathtaking 'look' of the images -- all HD, all in 16:9
widescreen format.
At the same time, impressed with the 'look' of the screen -- it was one of the
big iMacs, as it happened -- I was puzzled by the layout. I knew it wasn't
the 'old' iMovie; I'd seen the tutorials, read the manual, but it was still odd
to see it 'look' so different. I kept looking for the timeline, and there isn't
one. And for anybody who has spent any time with any movie editing program, the absence of a timeline is a jolt. Even as I played with the clips in the iMovie Project window, the one on the upper left, learning how to move them, re-arrange them (hint: select, then click and drag), learning how to trim them (hint: click on the little teeny icon on the bottom left of the frame, and a
trim window opens), it didn't drawn on me what Apple -- or the mysterious
engineer who went scuba diving and then was inspired to re-invent iMovie -- had done. I'm almost embarassed to admit, I'd been playing with the clips in the Project window for ten or fifteen mintues when it dawned on me!
They had change the paradigm!
No longer is iMovie based on the idea of a timeline. Now, with iMovie 08, the model is the storyboard.
Let me explain what I mean.
There are essentially two fundamental ways to organize your clips. One is the
time-honored 'timeline', in which you arrange your clips along a line, a
timeline, from left to right.
The other way to organize your story, now almost universally done, in
movies, in TV productions, in full length animations, is the 'story-board'.
With a 'story-board' approach, originally you created a series of sketches of
something representative of each scene, then you move them around until they told the story you want to tell. You could arrange them choronogically, from beginning to end; you could arrange them with an ending clip first, then
'flashback' to tell the story; you could arrange them in whatever order that best teold the story that you wanted to tell.
Once it hit me, that the essence of what Apple has done is change the paradigm, everything else began to fall into place.
Hal
PS: Scrubbing is now called 'skimming'. 😉
PowerMac G4, dual 800-MacBookPro, Mac OS X (10.4.10)
