iMovie
iMovie comes with all Macs as part of the iLife package.
One of the advantages of the Mac is the high quality applications that come with it. iMovie is a very slick, easy to use, way of assembling movies from video clips. I don’t do much video editing but I checked out the program to see how easy its user interface was for basic operations without looking at any manuals or help files.
When I first started the program it asked to search for any videos in my iPhoto library and it found all that were there and added them as clips that I could use to create movies. It is also very easy to add clips using the iSight camera built into my Mac. Another nice integration with other built-in applications is that you can add any music from your iTunes library as background for a movie. That was all very nice.
The program is very easy to use with drag and drop from the clips window into the movie project window. I’ve heard that there were many complaints from previous iMovie users that they switched from the timeline view of older versions. I’ve used other video editing programs with timelines and I didn’t find this application to be very different from those. True, you don’t see a ruler with times on it, but you do see times for all the sections you are working on. Unless you are trying to fit the movie into a specific amount of time I don’t see any disadvantage of this interface.
There are standard transitions available that are easy to add between clips. I particularly liked the different types of text that could be superimposed on top of clips which included several types of lower third text.
There’s nothing super fancy about the capabilities but I think that is a good thing for non-pros because it reduces the temptation to get carried away. As a utilitarian application I think it does a good job.
Finally, movies can be exported in a number of sizes and the program is very helpful to show which is appropriate for the different hardware on which it will be viewed. I didn’t test it on anything other than my computer monitor but I am confident that at least for all Apple hardware and software that the output will work just fine.