Over the weekend I made my first movie using my new iPhone 4. All video and photos were shot during the load up of the Dismal art project with my iPhone 4 and then edited on the BART ride home from Oakland into the short video you see below.

My Review of iMovie for the iPhone

It’s obviously a 1.0 product but an amazing one at that. There are a few bugs and a few features that I’d like to see. On top of this the user interface could use a little work as I was left confused a number of times and much of the interface is hidden behind meaningless  icons or non-intuitive touch gestures. Luckily MacWorld has a good Hands on of iMovie for the iPhone.

Bugs

• Exporting crashes often, especially if you are exporting at HD. Others are also having this problem. Seems it many happens with videos longer than a minute or two that are composed of several photos or video clips. Annoyingly I was able to export the above video at medium size but not at HD.
• Importing photos from your photo library can be laggy.
• Changing the titles can also be laggy.

User Interface Issues

• Most of the interface icons are generic and meaningless. Even after several minutes of working with it I kept forgetting what each icon was. (See example: I mean what the hell is the difference between the down arrow in the box and the one in the folder? The one in the box on the left is import and the one in the folder on the right switches you to the video camera so you can shoot a new clip—shouldn’t that icon be a video camera?!?)
• I kept having issues with accidentally hitting the wrong button or control as there are a lot of too small interface elements and other too elements that are too big for their limited importance.  (See example: not how close the trim icon is to the down arrow folder icon. I accidentally hit that folder icon several times while editing.)
• Trimming the video clips is confusing as you are trimming blindly: trim then move head to where you trimmed; if wrong, try again; repeat. Ideally, to make this easier the head position should lock to where you are trimming so you can see what the hell you are doing.
• The controls for changing the Start/End of the “Ken Burns pan effect” is confusing. I finally figured out that grayed out was the active state but that was counter-intuitive.
• Took me forever to figure out how to delete a clip or photo. Dragging to the video area to delete is counter-intuitive. While you can double tap to delete video clips, when the iphone is horizontal the delete button is hidden—you can scroll to it but there is no indication that it is there.

Feature Lack

• While you can import photos from your photo library and music from your music library, you can annoyingly only import video from the camera roll.
  • This means that if you download the video and delete your camera roll, the video in your project is now missing. So make sure you finish your movie and export before deleting video off your camera roll!
• You can only add one music track even if your video is longer than your music
• There is no control to fade in/out music in added audio track
  • iMovie automatically lowers the music volume of your added audio track if you leave your video audio on so that you can hear the video, but I would like to control fade out when the video is ending.
• Titles only can be added to video clips not photos
• Titles last the entirety of a video clip
• Cannot create a text only titling slide
• Photos are forced to use the “Ken Burns pan effect” (though you do have control over the start/end points of the “Ken Burns” pan)
• Limited number of transitions: One global Cross Dissolve and each theme has it’s own special transition.
• There is no way within the app to split one clip into two or more clips.
  • This can be done in the Camera App before importing into iMovie, but it should be part of iMovie.
• No way to publish directly from the app—you must export to the camera roll and then you can publish from there or download it to your laptop
  • Worse publishing from the Camera Roll (to youtube/MMS/email) automatically compresses the movie into ugly-digital-artifact-landia! You have no option to publish an uncompressed full res video even if you are over wifi!

Conclusion

I still think it was worth the $5 as it’s great for what it is—though I seriously hope they fix the export bug soon. Also, I really dislike the lack of the ability to upload at full res. The fact that I can shot and edit 720p video all on the iPhone but still need a computer to publish online at full resolution is annoying. Secondly, the fact that it only works with video in the Camera Roll seems like an artificial limitation and I hope they fix that soon.

I’m also happy that Apple is charging for this app as it encourages 3rd parties to create their own video editing apps. I’d gladly pay money for a more functional and easier to use app.

One last thought that is a comment on the iOS in general: The fact that this app exports to the camera roll seems kludgey and really underscores the need for some sort of simplified universal file repository.

Posted via web from CatCubed’s Random Snippets

Posted via web from CatCubed’s Random Snippets

The e-zine What’s Up Buenos Aires has more on Tremor here. Also they have a couple mp3s to download:

Calipso

Surco

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More pictures and video are starting to surface on the internet from Balsa Man 2008. I’ve created a Balsa Man 2008 Flickr group to collect all the best shots from the event

Links to Photos & Video (this list will be continuously updated as I receive links):

• EdRabbit’s Balsa Man 2008 photos
• EdRabbit’s videos (Balsa Man Burn, DDI Burn)
• The Temple Burn (video)
• Romzelino’s photos
• ~Jeanne~’s photos
• ebisue’s photos
• Jay Bain’s photos
• Balsa Man 2008 Flickr pool

If you have more photos or video to share please add a comment below with links and I will add it to this list. If you are a Flickr member please tag your photos “BalsaMan2008″ and add your favorites to the Balsa Man Flickr Group pool.

p.s. Also check out EdRabbit’s own blog post wrap up of the event on Geeked Info.

Video of the glorious burn:

Note, yes I failed to raise the arms. Torch in hand, I was too eager to light it. Well the majesty of the burn made up for it and at least now I have at least one way it will be better next year. How else will The Balsa Man be better next year?

• We have a theme for 2009 “Big Dreams Writ Small” — build a small maquette of the huge art project you always dreamed of building.
• We’ll have more time set aside for viewing the fabulous art.
• I’ll be conducting more burn tests, so it can burn even more grand! This burn was pretty amazing but we can make it better.
• I’ll be designing a more impressive platform for next year’s Balsa man that relates to the theme.
• Oh and I’m thinking lasers, cause lasers make everything better.
• And of course the Balsa Man will improve most due to the creativity and spirit of the Balsa Man community!

See you all next year — keep the tiny Balsa Man community spirit alive!

It’s National Science Week — in Australia. The US used to have an official National Science & Technology Week which ran from 1985-1999, but unfortunately our current admin doesn’t seem to think science is all that important to celebrate. Well to be honest, the U.S. Dept. of Education (ED) and NASA attempted to sorta bring the idea back to life once in 2005 with the Excellence in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education (ESTEME) Week — an awkward name birthed by bureaucracy and doomed to die a forgotten death.

But who cares about our lame science hating government! We can celebrate the AWESOME POWER OF SCIENCE Aussie style with Professor Funk!

Like some science-punk crossbreed between Yahoo Serious and Vyvyan Basterd, the Professor Funk drops the science with a hilarious self-aware dorky psuedo-hipness in his YouTube video series Saturday Night Science with Professor Funk: “A video series on the science behind weekend culture. Take a look at the strange, sexy and stupid side of sex, drugs, music, money and fashion.”

Professor Funk uses actual scientific surveys to ask important questions such as Mac or PC Which Makes You Sexier? or Do Stripes Actually Make You Look Taller? The best has to be his video on musical synesthesia where he shows just what the Imperial March from Star Wars might taste like by eating a range of items from tonic water to grass to water to used q-tips!

p.s. For more great Aussie science, I also highly recommend the excellent All In the Mind, the Australian ABC Radio National podcast about neuroscience and psychology. The program is always interesting, each broadcast dedicated to a single topic.

This being San Francisco—which is if not the heart at least the aorta of the intertubes—one would expect all its candidates to have web savvy campaigns. I mean come on this is 2007! If the little town of Medicine Park, OK (pop. ~400) can have a blog, shouldn’t we expect our politicians to be a bit more internet-slick?

Recap of Round I

In Round I, I covered the web campaigns of Chicken John and Gavin Newsom. Neither of them got very many style-points for their web presence, but Chicken John was the winner of that bout with his more personal and direct internet campaign.

The judges reconsider

However, it seems that the judges missed something in their review: as it turns out, the Gavin Newsom campaign, Act Locally SF*, has a flickr account, and they have an active YouTube campaign. Mostly it’s just a bunch of long rambling unedited boring meetings, but I love his Pet Peeves on the Streets series!

The Pet Peeves on the Streets video series have Gavin Newsom himself interviewing random people on the street and in barbershops asking what their pet peeve is with San Francisco. The series is a few months old at this point, but they are a good attempt to reach out to people the way that this new social web is meant to. We need to see more campaign ideas like this.

So with this revelation, I gotta give the YouTube Stardom category over to Gavin Newsom, and I’d say the Web 2.0 Social Aptitude category is now a tie.

With this turnover, Gavin Newsom is now in the lead as the top 21st century political candidate of San Francisco!

A scrappy new contender

However, Gavin Newsom shouldn’t get too cocky. He only won that one by a nose and as Scott Beale of Laughing Squid reports, Josh Wolf seems to be coming out with both guns blazing. He’s got a new blog, Josh Wolf for Mayor and a campaign video. The judges have yet to completely review but they did have this to say:

“Please please next time get a tripod and don’t ever sit in front of a nauseatingly bright greenscreen!!!”**

So stay tuned for Round II where it’s the stiff backed experienced politico Gavin Newsom against the slouched over activist Josh Wolf!

* I gotta say though that Act Locally SF is a terrible campaign name. It sounds more like a generic NGO then a campaign. Why not just Gavin Newsom 2007?

** Bonus Points go to anyone out there who takes Josh Wolf’s video and remixes it using the greenscreen background for something Dumb. Note: that’s Dumb with a capital D—ya know the kind of Dumb that’s actually funny and creative.