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Review: iMovie for iPad
For many reasons, I've been interested in video editing and making movies for years; nothing professional, I just thought it was kind of neat to be able to put together movies. Over 20 years ago, I put together footage that I had taken at the 1989 National Scout Jamboree and put together a little video that I edited using our camcorder and a VCR. I may have even put in some titling using a computer, but I can't recall. That was quite rudimentary compared to what can be done today.
When Apple first introduced iMovie for the Mac, I thought it was quite neat and made a few videos, but the more video I took and stored, the more time consuming it became to edit the videos. Since then, I've made a few movies, but have mostly left that to my mother as she seems to like doing it and does a great job throwing together random clips and photos to make something interesting.
At the iPad 2 introduction, Apple showed iMovie for iPad. The ease of use looked amazing and getting it was one of my many reasons for buying an iPad 2. After I got my iPad 2 the other day, the first app I bought was iMovie. My intention was to make a movie from videos and photos that we shot in the last year of our son. While I was hopeful that I could accomplish that this weekend, I was also realistic that based on my past history, this might have been a pipe dream.
The first step in creating a movie was to make sure all my video was in the proper format for the iPad. I already wrote about transcoding all my video the other day, so that part was accomplished. I decided to see how far I could get this weekend. In about the 1 hour or so that I could use my iPad, I managed to apply all the video I wanted to the timeline and trimmed it. I then spent maybe another hour adding photos and dropping in some songs.
I was absolutely amazed that within about 2 hours, I was able to create a 9 minute movie ready to show. In the past, the movies I've made have taken me a long time on the order of 1 hour per 1 minute of final movie which really makes the process a drag. I'm now cautiously optimistic that I can keep up the movie making if it is this easy to make something half decent.
I did encounter a few issues with iMovie including crash or two. iMovie applies the Ken Burns effect to every photo added, something that I find pretty annoying. In order to remove this, you have to set the starting and ending zoom level and picture position to be the same. This is fine as long as you zoom out on every picture and align the picture to an edge; however, if you want to zoom in or center the photo, this process is extremely hard to do. I've submitted feedback to Apple to improve this.
iMovie on the iPad is intuitive in many ways, but I read through the in-app help which reduced some of my frustration (removing the Ken Burns effect is documented). I'd strongly recommend that people read the docs before starting a project as some actions are strange at first.
iMovie for iPad is almost a killer reason to buy an iPad 2 (it won't run on a first generation iPad). However, if your video isn't in a format that the iPad can show, you have to go through the long and tedious process of converting it; if you're also shopping for a new digital camera, I'd suggest looking for one that encodes video in a format that the iPad can show natively (also useful to import video when you're away from your computer). So far, my brief research shows that the Panasonic compact digital cameras use M-JPEG which the iPad should be able to read.
Pros
- Intuitive interface for most editing needs.
- Extremely fast method for creating movies.
- Decent results with little effort.
Cons
- Removing Ken Burns effect is a pain when adding photos.
- No ability to lower volume of music in particular parts of a clip, i.e. no fine grained audio editing. iMovie will "duck" the audio in the background music if there is music in a clip.
- It can be slow at times where the interface appears to be unresponsive.
- Occasional crashes.
Summary
If you have an iPad 2, spend the $4.99 and buy iMovie. Even if you don't make a lot of movies, just playing with it is worth it to see what the iPad 2 can do. This could be the way to edit movies at the end of a trip even before you get home as it is easy to put off the movie making and simply never get around to it.iMovie is an impressive piece of software and I hope that Apple keeps making minor improvements to touch up the edges.
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Video Transcoding for the iPad
When I first started syncing pictures to my iPad, I noticed that videos didn't sync. After some research, it turns out that the video/audio format used by my Canon SD960 IS, I kind of put it on the back burner and ignored it. Now that I have an iPad 2, I bought iMovie and wanted to do a little video editing this weekend. Unfortunately the only clips that I had on my iPad were taken with my iPhone 4.
After a bit of futzing around with AppleScript, I slapped together 2 scripts to transcode my videos into 720 p and suitable for use on my iPad. The big issues I found is that QuickTime Player (the one with Snow Leopard) changed the AppleScript syntax and exports asynchronously. For non-techies, this means that the export basically happens in the background. This created a problem as I don't know when each export ends; I need this information so that I can change the date on the exported file to match the original file as well only running around 10 exports going at once (too many running basically slows down the system).
So here's what I did:
- Created a new folder on the Desktop called Movies and dragged all my movies from iPhoto.
- Created a second folder on the Desktop called NewMovies.
- Opened AppleScript Editor and used the following script and saved it as an application.
property exportFolder : (path to desktop folder as Unicode text) & "NewMovies:"
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The wait ends (for my iPad 2)
On Tuesday, while reading my morning news and Twitter feeds, Andy Ihnatko tweeted that he heard reports that Apple Stores were receiving a bunch of iPad 2s. Given my luck getting an iPhone 4 the day after release waiting in a relatively short line, I decided to give it a try. I arrived at the Fashion Valley Apple Store around 8:25 am to see a line and took that as a good sign. When I got to the end of the line, 2 Apple Store employees asked which iPad 2 I wanted and when I said the 32 GB Black WiFi one, one of the employees pulled out a stack of cards and handed me one with the model number written on it. Very cool, I was going to get an iPad 2 without more waiting! At about 9:05 am, I went instead, paid the Apple tax and left with my brand new iPad 2. I already had a smart cover, so I was all set.
Now that I have an iPad 2, was it worth it? You'll have to wait for my "review" (my reviews are pretty quick and not as in-depth as the well paid tech journalists).
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Review: Netflix for iPad
The other day my wife came home and asked about Netflix streaming as someone mentioned to her that she used her Wii to stream. I said that we could give it a try as it is only $8 per month. I signed up for the free trial and started playing with the iPad app to setup my instant queue and see how well it streamed.
The iPad app works, but really is an unpolished app. Within a few minutes of using it, I became frustrated with it. First off, when I tapped on an item, it didn't highlight as most iOS apps do; this is likely due to laziness as iOS provides a way to highlight an entire row and the app uses two columns so it separates the row and highlighting part of a row would have required extra work. Next the app was slow when I tapped on a selection so I wound up tapping more than once. This caused problems as it kept starting to play a selection as the second tap was queued up.
My problems didn't stop there; after a selection plays and you go back to the home screen, your location in the list is lost. So if I scrolled through the selections, found one, tapped it to view more, but accidentally tapped twice and it started played, when I cancelled out of it, my position was lost. This made the experience quite annoying.
When you scroll through the list, the last row said "Load More Titles". This is another aspect of what I consider poor programming or laziness. The more polished apps automatically start loading once the last row is displayed. It is actually quite easy to implement and saves the user a tap.
The app suffers from rotation issues as it gets quite confused and doesn't resize the list at times when you rotate the display. Further showing lack of polish is when I went to switch apps and showed the bottom bar, the main loading page came back up. Strange behavior for an app.
Pros
- Convenient way to add items to instant queue.
- Reasonable playback quality
Cons
- Unpolished application that suffers from some serious usability issues.
- Bugs cause some strange behaviors when rotating and switching apps.
Summary
While it is great to see that Netflix has come up with an iPad app, I would have expected more from a well recognized brand name. My view is that they either used inexperienced in-house developers or outsourced it to a company that needs some work on developing quality products. I hope that they continue to update the app and address some of the issues I've noticed.
The app is still usable to add items to the instant queue, but the process could be a bit cleaner.