I got my hands on iLife 06 the other day, and decided to try out iMovie 6 with a short film of my lap around the Monaco F1 track. The first cut is here (19Mb QT mp4 file).

I have tried out a few of the new theme features, but as you will see there are some problems with the rendered output, the on the fly preview is fine, but on the timeline and in out put it's not very good. I have tried different pictures, restarts etc... and the problem is still there, it does move around, ie breakups are not always in the same place.

Overall I found it quite easy, but I much prefer Adobe's file management style. I would love to try out Final Cut Express but I'm dammed if I'm shelling out £200 !!!

So, what do you think? Lots of work to do, it's far from perfect, not not a bad first effort.

Another thing I am not happy with is the music, does anyone know what the new F1 music is ???

Cheers

Cris.

As far as the odd effects on exporting, maybe this is a sign of bad memory (along with the issues you had with the machine not booting a bit ago). Have you booted to the first DVD and ran the diagnostics? To do so, reboot holding the Option(alt) key until a boot menu appears, then pick the hardware test option off the DVD.

Beyond the rendering issues, it looks good.

I've got iLife 06 but not tried the newer version of iMovie yet but iMovie 05 had odd bugs. Have you been fiddling with the transition times? If I did that then it was as you said, the preview looked great but when you rendered it bits would be cut oddly or put in the wrong order. The only way I found to fix it was to start a new project and reimport all the clips.

Cool.

Is there anything like iMovie available for PC users? I've used an old version of Edit Studio in the past but wondered if there is anything cheaper, more funky and easier to use?

My Dad uses Pinnacle Studio to great effect, it works really well for him. The only thing missing are the themes (the bits at the beginning and end of my movie) but I guess these sorts of feature are kind of unique to apple.

Cheers

Cris.

There's always Windows Movie Maker, included with XP. (Tried it once. Can't remember but it seemed easy enough).