Apple Thoughts: Making The Impossible Possible

"Maybe it seems a bit nitpicky, but it's bothersome that such a basic thing should be impossible. What is a guy to do if he doesn't want his wedding footage to be shrunk, cropped, or needlessly re-encoded? I'll tell you: get a PC. Because that's where I'm doing all my editing from now on after this debacle. iMovie and its picky formatting, its weirdo interface, and its crappy transitions can go straight back to Cupertino."

I don't know. Seems to work just fine for me (see my unretouched screengrab above). Had he complained about the broken deinterlacer built into iMovie '09, he might have had a point, but for someone who calls something "literally impossible" it must be embarrassing to be shown up by commenters who call him ignorant for turning on the scaling options in QuickTime when exporting something that's already in the proper proportions.

And finally, Mr. Coldewey says iMovie '09 "kicks 720p to the curb." Well, no, it doesn't. Actually the Share Movie function never had 720p. You may wonder why. Well, originally, the AppleTV didn't support 720p. Yes, Apple hasn't updated that export function since it was introduced in iMovie '08 (maybe he should downgrade and see for himself) and they probably should, but at least they give you other ways to export your movies directly. Frankly, if something like this matters that much to you, you'd probably want the extra control QuickTime offers over a generic format for YouTube, MobileMe, and the iPod.

This article is a perfect example of a tech writer starting with a premise and then pulling together everything possible to back it up, but instead proving only that they know very little about what they're writing about.