Let me just say that I’m not one of those people who laments changes to sites like Facebook or Twitter; most of that is us needing to get used to something new, which is always a little scary. But I am going to admit something — I hate the new iMovie. Which isn’t exactly new, I’m talking about the major overhaul Apple did to iMovie with its ’08 version; we are now on iMovie ’11 — same overhauled program, with some updates.
This comes to mind because of a major problem my students and I encountered last month with exporting from iMovie, and because Apple recently announced another overhaul, this time for Final Cut Pro. My experience with Final Cut is not extensive — it’s obviously a great program if filmmakers are using it for major films, but for the purpose of teaching high school journalism students how to tell stories through different means, iMovie takes minimal time to get going so we can focus on storytelling through video and not the program itself. It’s also free with Macs. And free is good.
But as my students were putting together 10-minute documentaries for a state contest, we noticed that although the audio was working fine in the iMovie project, once we exported it (in any format — we tried everything), the audio would disappear from some clips and not sync in others. This only occurred in projects where they had adjusted audio levels, but the clips that were having problems weren’t necessarily those that had been adjusted.
After much googling and consulting with the media tech teacher, who works with Final Cut and said this had never happened in that program, I found a few message boards that mentioned this problem.
Two suggestions from users:
1. Change all audio levels to a round number like 75 percent or 50 percent, not a random 17 or 361 percent. We tried this, and even increased or decreased all audio to 100 percent, in hopes of tweaking the audio after export in Final Cut. This fix didn’t work though.
2. Extract all of the audio from the video clips. What a pain — why is this necessary, Apple? But it worked, and we were down to the deadline and had already lost one film due to a computer crash and not having backed it up on the server, so there was no time for questioning.
The students ended up winning third and fifth place, pretty darn good for first-year students with only a week or two of video training. (Here’s the first and second place.)
If anyone knows why this happens in iMovie and if there are fixes ahead, please let me know. I never encountered this with the pre-overhaul version, which thanks to some new computers, we no longer had to use. I’d like to embrace this newer version — after all, it’s been through a few versions by this point — but this is a flaw that seems to detract from the purpose of making it better. Hopefully the overhauled Final Cut fares better.
