I find iMovie '08 unusable. If I had perfectly set little clips, that were ready to be dropped into a project with nothing more needed than minor edits and adding in a transition (and where did all of those go?) here and there, it'd be fine. However, the lack of a time line, no split at playhead, no fade out, no fade in, chapters being thrown into iDVD (and NOT in an intuitive manner at that), etc. makes it entirely frustrating to use. I do a lot of format conversions. I have to take one long piece of DV, that contains various scenes within it, I need to split them where necessary, move the clips around, transition etc., and with pieces like this, it's just painful, and near impossible to use. I do love the skimming feature, but for me, this should be a toggle, that once you hit the frame you want, you can turn it off, easily select, and edit. Instead, when you move the mouse, it keeps skimming, and you've lost your selected frame.

I was told "Of all the things I have struggled to unlearn from iMovie6HD... Everytime I think I want to split-at-playhead, I'm just thinking about the editing process in the wrong way. iMovie08 wants you to select the excerpts you want the Event Library and drop them into the project where you want them. You can grab a new selection and drop it in the middle of an existing project clip, or select part of a project clip and delete it or cut-n-paste it to elsewhere."

For me, that's part of the problem. I never had to "learn" iMovie. It was just intuitive, and every new version (previously) added to what I already used in a positive way. My very first time with iMovie, I just sat down, and started producing videos. With '08, I just look at it, and after the initial, "Wow, this looks awesome!", I scratch my head and can't figure out how to DO anything with it. If split-at-playhead was my only issue, I could work around it, but film is a linear media. To not have an accessible, and editable, time line, doesn't make a lot of sense. For now, it's too overwhelming in the change department, and general theory, as well as lacking the tools that I use, for me to be immediately productive. I'm sure they're not rolling back to the '06 model, so I'll have to keep trying. For better, or worse, I'll be going back to iMovie HD, for the time being. At least with that, I can be productive and get my work done. And really, isn't that what Apple products are supposed to be about?

Oh, and the importing of an old '06 project, is painfully slow.