Lights, camera, distraction

It is not often I get second thoughts about first impressions. Today is different.

Let me explain. A couple of weeks back, I wrote in positive terms about the latest incarnation of Apple's consumer video editing package, iMovie 3 (Live the iLife, Online, February 2 2003).

I had used it for a few days since its release, and put together some reasonable short bits of footage, complete with music and a nice shiny theme thanks to its sister package, iDVD. It was not a proper attempt to review the product - best to leave that to those who have sampled every bit of video editing software since the stone age. But, based on my own use, I had certainly had no qualms about it.

Wasn't it fantastic, I mused, that we could cut together video on a desktop computer system, when previously we needed expert help and thousands of pounds worth of kit?

This should have been safe ground. But within hours of the story appearing here, there was a steady drip of complaints into my inbox, from the grumbling to the outraged. Some suggested I was simply very patient to put up with all iMovie's quirks (I am not). Others suggested I had not even bothered to use the software (I had).

One, more helpfully, pointed to a set of technical discussion boards on Apple's website, where a long litany of complaints about iMovie was being compiled. And, I was amazed to discover, some of the grumbles were very serious. To someone who had not used iMovie 3, it would look like the bug-reporting list of a beta (test) piece of software.

The program was crashing frequently. It was inserting blank frames every time the user wanted a special effect. The audio was losing synch with the video. It was failing to import movies, eating entire scenes, moving scenes around. And those were just the problems I fully understood: overall, the impression was this software was a disaster zone.

And yet I had not experienced one, single fault in hours of use. This, I felt, was a little odd.

Even stranger, looking around the net at the proper reviews of the iLife suite, the specialist press was hearty in its praise.

ZDNet (in a review also used on CNET) said "The free iMovie 3.0 is head and shoulders better than last year's $49 [£31] version." MacUser UK was equally bold: "iMovie 3 is free, fun to use, and without a doubt one of the best home-user programs on the Mac. Every DV camera owner should get a copy."

The most restrained magazine review I saw was in the US edition of Macworld, which gave iMovie 3 three and a half out of five - and even it did not mention any of the show-stopping bugs. I called round, even spoke to some of the staff on the Mac magazines, and they had heard nothing of iMovie's supposed flaws.

So what was going on?

It was time to go back to my iMac, and see if I could recreate the problems. Previously, I had only edited together brief films to test the package's new capabilities. This time, I put together a longer effort, trying some of the new special effects and functions, exporting it all to iDVD and burning a disk to test the results on a DVD player.

And, lo, after a long evening of work, the hidden iMovie showed its ugly face. Without warning, after I burnt the DVD, I found the entire soundtrack had, apparently randomly, rearranged itself over the course of the 30-minute movie.

It had worked perfectly for pop video-length productions. But now this latest ballyhooed version was of no use at all to anyone who wanted to create something of more than (roughly) half an hour. There were other less serious faults - a mysterious gap in the video, a crackle in the audio - which appeared even more randomly. And I - like all those other users - had now wasted a substantial amount of time, not to mention the material cost of a burned DVD disk.

Some of the complaints raised by aggrieved users (and I really was beginning to understand their deep, chuck-it-out-the-window frustration now) could not be replicated on my reasonably up-to-date machine. But, having discovered the hidden horrors of iMovie 3, I was much more willing to believe those complaints were genuine too.

Even if they are not, it still means this: today Apple is shipping, in all its new machines and in shrink-wrapped boxes across the world, a piece of software that is in an unfinished state. It is pre-beta: if they were charging money for it, they would be facing demands for refunds (and, in fact, it is sold as part of the broader iLife package). Worse still (for them) they appeared to have replaced a perfectly sound, much-loved piece of software in iMovie 2 with this horror show.

Late last week I approached Apple's public relations people in the UK about the problems: they are now investigating. If they respond, I'll be sure to post their comments on our weblog.

In the meantime, beware: iMovie 3 appears to be filled with bugs of the worst kind. They are critical, "show-stopping" problems that manifest themselves only after the user has invested a great deal of effort in producing a long or complex movie. These are the kinds of faults that most reviews are unable to pick up, because to find them you would need to invest the kind of heavy use - and time - only real hobbyists tend to put in.

iMovie is seen as being great for home users, schools and colleges because it is free, and teaches people the basics of video editing. And I still maintain it would be, if it worked. But, for now, before many an end-of-term project is ruined, spread the word that, in its current state, this piece of software simply is not worth the CD-Rom it has been burnt on.