Recently I've been playing with iMovie 9. It was 12 years ago that I started exploring YouTube and uploading video files. The oldest of my iMovie files that I can find was created in March 2005, a few weeks before the first video was uploaded to YouTube.
Pre-OSX
Before I ever used iMovie, I had long used QuickTime for editing video files. Other video editing software that I used in the 1990s was Avid VideoShop.
Before iMovie: QuickTime 6 for video editing.
QuickTime
In the era of slow modem-powered internet connections, videos were short
and small. The CD-R optical disc was an early medium for sharing computer
videos.
Back in the 1990s I paid to get the "Pro" version of the QuickTime Player. The primitive QuickTime video edit timeline is shown here (above, in the wormh.mov video editing window) running in "Classic" (Mac OS-9) mode on an OSX G4 computer (video) from the early 2000s.
Ten years ago, when I started the wikifiction blog, I was still experimenting with alternatives to YouTube for uploading videos and displaying them on webpages (see this blog post).
In the old days, due to the limited amount of computer memory space, small animated GIFs were commonly used. Here is an example (image to the right) of an animated GIF. Here, the front and back cover images for the story Exodemic morph into each other. Back in 2003, I preferred the QuickTime video version of the morphing cover to the GIF.
Google's non-YouTube system for videos (Google Video) eventually got shut down. YouTube was the winner in the contest to establish a convenient online video upload/download platform. Video files are the major bandwidth hogs of the internet, with YouTube by itself currently serving up about 10% of all the data carried by the internet. By 2009, there were various websites that allowed users to make videos online (example).
Here is the user interface for the older iMovie version 6 that I used back in the early and mid-2000s:
The first computer that I used with iMovie 6 only had a 150 GB hard drive. Since a short iMovie project can easily use a GB of storage space, it would not take very long to fill up all the available memory with videos. The same basic functionality remains in the iMovie version 9 that I am now using:
iMovie version 9 running in OSX 10.13
If you have never used iMovie, here is a great tutorial for getting started with iMovie 9. Most of my video files from back in 2006 and 2007 work fine with iMovie 9, but some of my old video files go through a mysterious "conversion" process when they are opened by QuickTime version 10. If such a "converted" video file is opened in iMovie 9, it can fail to be played correctly by iMovie. So far, I've been able to open these old problem video files by specifying that iMovie open them at their original resolution, which is usually smaller than what iMovie 9 expects for a video file.
Project Fail
Importing old iMovie HD version 6 project files into iMovie 9.
The situation is worse for opening old iMovie HD project files with iMovie 9 (see the image to the left). There is an import option for this, but the old iMovie 6 project files display on my iMac as a plain folder. Never a good sign.
an iMovie HD project viewed on a computer running OSX 10.13.6
the iMovie HD project icon OSX 10.4
Inside the plain folder for the iMovie HD project are sub-folders that do have a movie folder icon and those sub-folders contain the project's media files. However, iMovie 9 fails to do anything with such an imported project. Apparently OSX 10.6 was the last version of OSX that was compatible with old iMovie HD project files. It seems silly that iMovie 9 lets me import iMovie HD projects, but then it can't use the media files in the imported project.
Old iMovie HD project "Import" into iMovie 9
without the transitions, titles and video effects.
Apparently the best you can do is use the "import movie" option, open the iMovie HD project folder and individually import each media file from the old project.
So, while the user interfaces for iMovie 6 and iMovie 9 seem quite similar, Apple apparently changed all of the details for how iMovie deals with transitions, titles and video effects. 😞
SlowTime
iMovie video processing
I have iDVD on my older Macs, but Apple discontinued iDVD. It was one of the more fun pieces of software for Macs; apparently too good for Apple. The old .dv files will play on newer Macs using QuickTime Player. Sadly, only about half of my DVDs made by iDVD play under OSX 10.13 (they still play on my old OSX 10.4 computer that made them).
Apple was pretty funny when it coined the term "quicktime" for its video file processing software. As it was in 2005, when I first used iMovie, working with video on a Mac can not only lead to a shortage of memory space, but also much time spent waiting while iMovie "processes" videos.
Importing a 3 minute video clip into iMovie 9 can take 15 minutes on my iMac with a 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5. Part of the problem is that iMovie 9 is 32-bit software. Yawn. 😴 iMovie 9 is fun to use, but I wish it had some of my favorite iMovie 6 scene transitions and special effects. Oh, well. iMovie 9 has its own new cool features for me to play with.
Science Fiction Videos
I have fun making short videos about my science fiction stories. To experiment with iMovie 9, I made an 8 minute video about The Dead Widower Society. The video explains how the novel Araminta Station by Jack Vance inspired my new story. View the video on YouTube.
Click here to visit this (above) YouTube video playlist for science fiction story trailers.
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