iMovie 09, which was shown today at Macworld, looks like a winner. In fact, for those that need to produce videos simply it looks like iMovie 09 has what it takes.
What are a couple of the features that I really like? The ability to easily splice video snippets, pull out audio from a clip, overlay audio, and stabilize video are all first rate features for any blogger or home video creator.
Unfortunately Microsoft’s MovieMaker pales by comparison. It’s quite unfortunate for us Windows users. Outside of paying too much money for a video editing application that we might use infrequently, my suggestion is to invest the money in hardware.
Here’s what I’m doing and I’m suggesting to more and more friends and developers: I may have a dedicated Windows notebook, like a Tablet PC, but I also have a Mac Pro and an iMac which run OS X to give me the great apps like GarageBand, the forthcoming iMovie 09, etc, and then using Bootcamp I have Vista running side-by-side. As a Windows developer I spend almost all my time in Vista, but I’m always glad to have the Mac apps handy.
Actually, in terms of videos, up to this point I think it’s been a bit of a tossup between iMovie and MovieMaker (both have their advantages and disadvantages), however, with the iMovie 09 the scorecard gives iMovie the edge and I think one more reason for people to consider Apple over a Windows-only machine.
I think Microsoft and its hardware partners need to pay attention to this trend. Inch by inch the Mac solutions are winning out for people like me. (There’s the iPhone and developing for it on OS X, there’s GarageBand, and now iMovie 09. Likewise, soon I think the webcam and its value is going to trend the Apple direction too unless Windows 7 pulls something out of its hat, but that’s another rant.) Am I in the minority? Yes. But for how long?