iMovie Glitches and Why They're the Thing That's Slowly Chipping Away at My Sanity and Self-Worth

I'm going to try and keep this one as impartial as I can, but as anyone who's had a shift with me can tell you, my interactions with iMovie frequently distress me.  In some weird perversion of fate, I'm becoming experienced with iMovie, despite my common and, quite honestly, glowing recommendations of Premiere Pro.  Everyone please use Premiere Pro.  Please.  It's important to me.  I know it looks complicated but so did your first bicycle, with all those spokes, gears, and pedals.  Please use Premiere, so that I can finally take my training wheels off.

A surprisingly accurate, if somewhat Dutch, analogy for the superiority of Premiere Pro.  If iMovie is walking, then Premiere is riding a bike downhill forever.  Please use Premiere

We'll start where any story that I ever put on this blog starts; a patron walks up to the desk and I thought I could help them.  You'd think that eventually I'd stop being so cocky, but so is hubris, so into Studio 3 I went.  The basic issue was the inability to capture directly to iMovie.

The first thing I did was ask them to show me.  So they did.  Then I tried it myself.  I thought I fixed it when I unchecked the "Hide Imported" box, but that turned out to be a short-lived triumph because as far as I can tell all that box controls is whether or not you want there to be a little white and blue box at the top right of your screen while you use your camera.  I'm sure there's more use for it, but for the life of me I don't know what it is.  No, the problem was deeper than that.

Just keep digging, Dillon.  The answer's down there somewhere.

Next, as any good Multimedia Student Employee does, I checked iMovie's preferences.  If you've never interacted with iMovie 10's preferences, I'll give you an exhaustive list of everything you could possibly want to sort through while you're there:

"Apply Slow Motion?"

Painfully tedious to sort through it I know.  Also this is all sarcasm.  Because as much as I like slow motion and would like to be able to use it, when I think "Program Preferences," I'm thinking audio preferences, media inputs, and exporting options, not whether or not I want to have iMovie automatically slow down my sick wheelie from when I was at the dope skate park.

You wish you were this tan and radical.

Having square one taken out from under me, I moved on to square two.  Rapid clicking and muttering.

When that (inconceivably) didn't work, I hopped my scotch over to square three, my always faithful fallback.  Adding a weird amount of steps to what should be a super simple operation, like when I helped that guy rebuild the folder hierarchy from Audacity, when I used too many words to describe a camera archive, or any time I'm in Studio 6.

If you're not confused when I'm done helping you, then I haven't really done my job.

I tried capturing in Premiere Pro and it ended up working.  It also saved the videos to the patron's hard drive as a Quicktime video.  Which I knew iMovie would be able to read, as long as it could find it on the hard drive.  If you're following me, what I recommended to the student is to capture all their videos in Premiere, saving them as a QuickTime file when the capture was done, then to import them into iMovie and do all their editing that way.  I also recommended not having both programs running at the same time, because everything would probably catch on fire.  So too many steps, and too much possibility for accidental arson.

I'm very popular at camp-outs.

Turns out that the real solution is to hit record on the actual camera, because iMovie 10 needs a timecode to capture from cameras.  I found that out because I sent an email detailing my epic journey and fifteen seconds later Nico came out from the back and told me.