Is the new iMovie ’08 one step forward two steps back? Or maybe just one big misstep. Many of us who have jumped in and had our hands on the new iLife 08 suite may have been seduced in that rush of the moment by the speed and fluidity of iMovie 08’s interface. But after getting down to business on it, we’re quickly finding a bunch of things missing. I’m not just complaining about chapter markers, or unnecessary transitions. I’m talking about real working methods and needed tools. One of the most glaring is the inability to split audio from video clips. That means it’s virtually impossible to slide a
video clip over  a lead-in audio to the next clip. It means you can’t take out unnecessary or wrong audio and lay in synchronized new tracks. This dumbing down of a great tool (iMovie) is an apparent big oversight in the great mind we know out here in the hinterlands as Apple. Were the engineers so taken by their new interface with its Events classifications and sorting, that they forgot that we also need the basic nuts and bolts to make the thing work for us? iMovie 08, at least at this point, seems like a new electric screwdriver without either Philips or Flathead attachments. It whirrs nicely, but it can’t do anything useful.

-andrew shalat