Wednesday - March 25, 2009

iMovie '08 vs iMovie '09

I upgraded to iLife '09 last week, primarily to get the iMovie '09 upgrade.  I have upgraded my iLife software since '05 and it usually is a great experience, new versions of the software I use.  iMovie has always received solid improvements, so I didn't even think about it much...  I installed it and went on vacation last weekend, looking forward to using it when I returned with vacation footage on my video camera.

So I start getting busy on a new project and all is well, actually, I am impressed with the software.  I am enjoying the new features such as the additional transitions, title options, and the precision editing mode.  In very little time, I have my first video with '09 finished, so the next step is to share it and this is where it gets frustrating.

After much trial and error on my part, and then searching the Internet for what might be the problem I think I figured out what the problem is.  The de interlace video option is broken in the H.264 video compression, and since I was shooting in HD 1080i and compressing to 720p for sharing the video online, the resulting video output looked like crap.  This all worked fine in iMovie '08.

I found this web page and it contains the solution.  I am now post processing my raw 1080i video from iMovie '09 with JES Deinterlacer.  It takes extra time, an extra step and temporarily takes a lot of disk space to share my movies now.  I hope Apple fixes this soon...