Pretty awesome stuff…
About a million years go (OK, maybe 15), I gave a speech at The Cable Conference in Chicago.
The day after, someone called me up and said that IÂ should meet with the CEO of their company.
That’s an invitation I never turn down – even if it was in Baltimore.
So I took the train down and did my best pitch session with a man named John Erickson.
When the meeting was over, I had agreed to teach his people to shoot and cut their own video.
His people, it turned out, were the residents of his chain of retirement communities – Erickson Retirment Communities
I spent the next 18 months teaching people whose media age (no kidding) ranged in the 70s, 80s and often beyond.
The funny thing was, they were pretty good.
Shooting was easy for them – all automotic, and the cameras were small and light.
When it came to editing, I thought – Final Cut is going to be too complex. Some of these folks had never touched a computer before. So we went with iMovie. It was an early iteration – but it was still drag and drop and WYSIWUG. They got it. In fact, they got it so well that John Erickson went on to found Retirement Living TV.
That experience taught me that iMovie indeed had its place.
We used iMovie again when we started running our filmmakers bootcamps on Crystal Cruise ships. These folks didn’t want to become Hollywood film makers – they just wanted to make better home videos of their travels and their grandchildren, and again iMovie gave them exactly what they wanted.
Next week we’re going to start a video training bootcamp with a US Government agency.
They also don’t want to make movies – they want to create simple yet compelling videos for the US.gov websites.
They think and we think that iMovie 11 works just fine for this.
I think it does.
The notion of video literacy and the ability to create and translate your ideas into video does not always require the full firepower, cost and complexity of Final Cut Pro (or Final Cut X – as soon as that comes out). Sure, it’s a great software. People cut feature films with it.  But not everyone wants to make feature films. Sometimes, you just want to shoot a few minutes of stuff and crank out something that looks great. (Check out iMovie 11’s Movie Trailer function).
The technology moves incredibly fast now.
When I started in the TV business we were still cutting on RM450 decks – tape to tape. About all you could do was ‘in’ ‘out’ and ‘edit’.
If you wanted to put in text, that required a chyron machine and a chyron operator.
Hard to believe.
But we broadcast that stuff every day.
If someone had walked into the editing suite in those days with iMovie 11 we would not have believed what we saw – or we might have thought that a machine like that would cost millions of dollars. (Indeed, a good conform room did cost about $1 million).
So I am not saying that iMovie 11 is as good as Final Cut Pro. No way!
But I am saying that for a lot of what you might want to do in video – website, mobile video, demo reels – iMovie, at its price point, might be the right first choice.
And just think, if things keep going the way they have been, in 20 years you’re gonna look at Final Cut Pro and say ‘you’re kidding! We used to think that was the way to edit”?
Just saying…
