My husband and I are YouTubers who like to put out a professional product but don't yet have money in the budget for a professional movie editing program. We have found iMovie to be a very good product for the price! We're actually amazed at being able to combine multiple video and audio tracks together, do various transitions, change the speed of clips, crop, use filters, etc. There really is so much you can do, and I'm learning new tricks all the time to improve my videos. The frustrations I have with this program, first and foremost--the "Titles" are very limited. I find myself constantly tweaking the few options that are there to "kind of" do what I want, and there are such limited places and styles to overlay text on a clip. I would also love to be able to include other animated graphics, such as moving arrows or circling an object. And finally, exporting videos is excruciatingly slow and requires so much hard drive space! I have had to connect a bootable external hard drive to my Macbook just for iMovie use, since I've started shooting in 5K .If these issues could be resolved, I would honestly not ever have need for a "professional" movie program, and would give this a resounding 5 stars.

My first macbook this year! I was so excited having already invested in much of the apple market and wanted to finish it off. I was utilizing garage band on my other devices, partnered with another program to edit on that was slightly easier on my PC. I also loved utilizing imovie on my iPad. So it was a natural progression that when I needed to invest in a new computer, I would go with Mac. I loved imovie on the ipad, and the transition to my mac was easy (unlike garage band which the programs were not utilized the same). Movies for work, for personal blogging, and for fun was easy to do using imovie. Upon the most recent update (10.1.7), however, it is impossible to create a movie as the app crashes upon opening. Call me impatient for a new bug fix release (as the update just occured). but it is kind of important that things work as they are supposed to when I need them to. That’s what we expect from Mac/apple, right? Seamless integration, effectiveness, productivity, etc… can’t be productive if the app doesn’t work. :(. Wil update my review when apple fixes this issue. :)

I’ve been using Apple’s resident video software since iMovie 9. I make (or made, to be more accurate) a lot of short videos for classroom presentations. A LOT. Like hundreds and hundreds of them over the past decade. I loved using iMovie 9. Inserting text was easy, inserting cuts and transitions was easy, precision editing was easy, and the stacked timeline view was very, very helpful. Even though I upgraded my OS a couple times, I continued using iMovie 9 rather than whichever new version of iMovie Apple was inserting into its upgrades. Now, however, I can’t do that, because iMovie 9.0.9 washes all the color out of videos that are imported or re-used for another project. I suspect this was deliberate. So now I’m stuck with iMovie 10.x. This is a terrible, terrible “update.” Counter-inuitive, needlessly clunky, not at all user-friendly. It can’t even find all the videos I’ve already created on its own — it requires a janky process of teaching the thing where to find iMovie projects. Simply ridiculous. It’s as if the design/development team set itself to the task of finding the greatest number of ways they could force otherwise loyal iMovie users to have to relearn everything they’d already learned about video editing. So now, even though I need to make far fewer videos for classes, I’m at the point of frustration with this software that I’m going to drop a couple hundred dollars on REAL video editing software and strip this kludge out of my system once and for all.

As soon as I begin to create videos of any real length over a minute or two, iMovie chokes completely. I recorded about an hour of 1080p video with my Sony video camera, imported it to my Mac and tried to edit down to about 10 min. I wasted days letting it process my video files which Windows Movie Maker had 0 issues with in the past. The first thing I noticed is the temp files wiped out about 100gb of space on my drive to store temporary data.When editing for even a minute or so the spinning wheel would begin again. I’d literally fall asleep watching it. My Macbook is mid 2015 model with the video all on an SSD drive and 8GB ram. I made sure it had plenty of memory and CPU available. After weeks of wasting my time with iMovie, I finally started from scratch on my 2011 Windows PC with non SSD hard drive, using the old Windows Movie Maker software. Within about 2 hours time I had somethng that could be published. My expensive Mac was crushed by my old cheap PC with the free Movie Maker software from Microsoft, in the department Apple use to be known by - Video. My how have times changed. I spoke to customer support, they asked for details of the video files. It was noted. Weeks later I’ve heard no response.