[CandyMaffia]

i don't have an digital camrecorder, but considering to buy one when the money is enough..

now my question is, if it's worth to buy one, cause i have one ibook 700mhz (see below for specs), and the imovie is so slow.. but now apple recently released some fresh updates for it, and they are talking 'bout the speed.. but it is really so speedy?? what do you users think that uses the imovie more often then i do..

péter

[plyxrbo]

imovie 3.03 is MUCH faster than previous versions. not so much faster, but the responsiveness is faster. it does not feel as sluggish or as if it has paused on you while you are working (i work on a g4/733/1GBRAM).

my serious complaint --and not sure if others have experienced this-- is that no matter what i do to the sound levels of imported music, it always seems to BLARE in the final export.

any ideas?

[ender]

My brother has a 500 MHz iBook, so a little slower than yours; and he does use iMovie a little bit. His major problem though is that the iBook can not keep up with DV capture to his external Firewire hard drive, and he usually looses frames or the capture terminates.

He captures to an external drive because his internal 10 GB drive is too small to capture DV. You may experience similar problems with your 20 GB drive (1 hour of DV is about 12-14 GB). Even a couple of short projects will quickly fill your drive.

Your 700 MHz iBook should run iMovie OK (adding effects and transitions will still be painfully slow!), but if the capture bottleneck is something other than the CPU speed (lack of cache, Firewire bus if using an external drive, system bus speed, etc) you may have problems getting your DV from the camcorder to your iBook.

[zigzag]

I don't think you'll have trouble capturing directly to the iBook drive - I've never had a problem.

I don't know how iMovie 3.03 will do on an iBook. My preference is to stick with iMovie2 until all of the bugs are worked out on 3. Except for the occasional crash, iMovie2 works very well.

Whatever you do, be sure to save your work frequently (command-S).

[plyxrbo]

after several serious attempts to use iMovie 3.03 as my main editing tool, i keep going back to iMovie 2. iM3 still has LOTS of bugs that will ultimately drive you crazy (off-center titles, uncontrallable audio levels in final production, etc.).

[basscat]

I have an iBook 700, 16 vram, 30 hd, 640 ram, and iMovie 3.0.3 works fine. I'm sure it would be better on a faster machine, and rendering transitions and effects does take a little time ( but much less now than 3.0-3.02) but it's not bad, unless, I suppose, you're used to a dual 1.42 or something.
Actually, mine works better when I put stuff on my Firewire drive, maybe because it is a 7200 rpm drive instead of the internal 4200 rpm, I don't know for sure. I don't do pro work, but have a lot of fun with it and bring lots of joy to friends when making their "home movies" into productions. Amazing what some editing and a soundtrack can do.......

[Josh Reid]

I use iMovie 3.0.3 with an iBook 600, 640MB, 40GB. It's just a bit slower than iMovie 2 (transitions' rendering time doesn't seem slower, however), but for me it's totally usable. In about 20 total hours of editing, 3.0.3 never crashed. (3.0 & 3.0.1 were nightmares in regards to that.)

There are those few bugs that other people have mentioned, but keep in mind that they don't affect everyone all the time. I have off-center titles, but my audio levels export correctly.

I've done a lot of work in iMovie 2, and so far I've done two big projects in iMovie 3.0.3, and it works well. I'm definitely looking forward to doing video-work on a G4 sometime in the near future, but for a bit longer, this iBook is adequate.

-Josh