W9 iMovie Doom and Gloom, bring on VidCrop

Having committed to use iMovie, I committed myself to a common problem as the Apple site later attested to: do not move your files. If you do when you try to re-enter the iMovie project; it won't work. At VU we do not have permanent server space allocated to us, instead we have to save files to USBs or external drives.

If one has the right software at home one can do work there even using a PC and this was true for Gimp and InkSpace, but not for iMovie. As an alternative I could use Windows MovieMaker, but only in an either/or senario: I either used iMovie to make my movies or MovieMaker which created scheduling issues for the remaining workshops available to me ie what can I do in the lab at all. Or it meant finding other times to get to the campus Mac Lab - very unlikely given my uni schedule.

Thus, last Wednesday, it came down to me and the tutor trying to work out a technical way around the problem of neither being able to reopen projects (not even copying everything back to where it had been in my temporary server space worked) nor import MPEG files as the help file said iMovie could! Miserable.

I resolved in mind that the test version of what I'd shot for the Going Nowhere movie, plus the completed soundtrack, might have to suffice for that art work and that the rest I'd edit on MovieMaker. This left the problem of how to deal with what MovieMaker lacks.

iMovie is an easy-to-use interface even if it lacks the capacity to do things like reverse, flip or slow or speed-up film and it has the abilities to manipulate the colour quality of the image and to crop the frame. I saw the potential of the cropping facility immediately. Not only did it mean that I didn't have to be so rigorous in what was in/out of frame when I shot - rigour meaning time-consuming - but, in effect, cropping is like an extra zoom. And the colour manipulation also gave me the option to add in a further loop of the movie. Having shot the film I'd now lost all these options!

Instead I Googled for shareware and found a free version of VidCrop, which I later tested. Very easy to use and compatible with MovieMaker. I did have to buy it, of course, as the cropped film would have a huge floating logo otherwise! And, the installation process, while easy, was obscure and required some detective work to compare what the support person said should be so - a registration email with instructions - but wasn't and how to search though and use what was actually available - a web-based receipt.

So now I can crop all the footage and import it into MovieMaker's library and edit all three movies. I have experimented with the effects library and I may be able do to some looping visual effects although not the same as iMovie and it does have the capacity to slow down, speed up and flip the shot. I can also publish the film to DVD in the same package which overcomes any potential problems with trying to work out what files are needed and how to transport and recreate the file structure for iDVD at VU - I just don't want to go there!