My hatred for iMovie knows no bounds, so I'd say your best bet is to look for an old version of either Premiere or Final Cut Express.

I think the old versions of iMovie were quite decent. Not fond of the recent revs, though.

tiggy, get familiar with Low End Mac [link] I think you'll find it a useful site. Ebay and Craig's List are places to look for old versions of software programs although it never hurts to ask here and other places because a lot of people are slow about clearing out their old software programs.

Whereas I actually really like iMovie. And I've used FCE pretty extensively. iMovie doesn't offer the level of customization I'd like, but for basic hobby stuff, it's pretty easy to use.

thanks! a friend of mine has iLife and really likes it. that has iMovie in it, right? along with GarageBand(which is what she mostly uses it for).

My problem is I was trained on Avid, so the iMovie interface never made any sense to me. Final Cut Express was annoyingly dumbed-down (and pointlessly so in many cases - remove features for the cheap version, sure, but if a feature exists in both versions and works exactly the same way, why should the button for it be in a completely different place????) but at least it maintained an industry standard window layout.

Yep, iLife has iMovie.

see...having never done any video editing, i'm thinking starting out with iMovie may be the best bet for me. thanks guys and gals!

Yes, iMovie is the one that's part of iLife. I'm not a fan of it (although I don't have Jess's level of burning hatred), but others are -- it's certainly worth trying out to see if it fits your needs. (Also note that iMovie is frequently updated, and they tend to make huge changes between revisions, so the version your friend uses may be very different from the one you get; there are a lot of people out there holding on to versions they like better, and so some confusing info out there.) (As always, ask here first and we'll get you sorted out.)

Final Cut Express is Apple's mid-range video editing software. It has an interface that's much closer to the very expensive Pro stuff, but without some of the features; the latest version will run on your machine, but with some limits -- in particular, the raw video from some High Def video cameras comes in a format that only works on an Intel machine.

Final Cut Pro is expensive enough that you should only get it if work is paying or your passions and livelihood depend on it. And complex enough that you probably won't feel a need for it until you've gotten the basic concepts down on something easier to learn anyway.

Ultimately, the right fit depends on what you want to do -- iMovie is popular for putting together vacation/wedding/f2f stuff, but much less suited for something like (fan) vids, whereas FCE or FCP allow a lot more control if you want to get exactly THIS frame synched to exactly THAT music beat.

(surely x-posty as hell by now...)

awesome! thanks for all the input. much appreciated.

Raq:

why delicious? I use Xmarks for syncing bookmarks.