There’s quite a disturbance in the force lately if you ask the tech blogging community, and it involves the latest release of Apple’s iLife suite of multimedia apps. This release offers complete overhauls of several important apps; and one, the new version of iMovie, is being met with some bad reviews. They stem from the fact that iMovie ‘08 has in many ways parted with the design specification set forth by the very first version: offer many of the same editing tools found in Final Cut Pro–timelines, transitions and multiple audio sources–but with a far lower learning curve and a rock bottom price (iLife ‘08 retails for $79.95).

But instead of focusing on the budding feature film director iMovie ‘08 is primarily concerned with helping you throw a movie together in “half an hour.” This means no timeline or multiple audio sources—in other words most of the things that made it so popular in the first place are gone. Apple does bill this as a complete recode of the old app, but it’s odd to shift the focus of an app so dramatically and maintain the name and versioning of all the previous incarnations. But really, I don’t care.

I’ve never made a movie in iMovie that I thought was all that great. Something happens to you after you see a Stanley Kubrick movie that makes it really difficult not to sweat the small stuff when you make a movie. When I shot those vlog posts a few weeks back I finally had to give up and give the camera to my wife to shoot me with, since I spent forty five minutes fidgeting around for good camera angles and lighting. Even when all the footage was in the can I had a terrible time editing myself, and a worse time color correcting each clip and making it ready to mix down. At one point I had actually dug up my old copy of Final Cut Pro and started editing there.

Yes, I was editing MiniDV footage from the three year old hand held camera with a $1300 editing system. Perhaps you see the level of perfectionism I’m dealing with here.

I guess my problem is that I’ve never been certain what the real goal of this much power on a consumer computer really is supposed to be. I understand the dream of the software: Apple’s demo movies always look so slick, like music videos would if anyone showed them anymore—all slash cut edits and triumphant choruses from Fallout Boy songs and daring 180’s off of powdery moguls. But every iMovie I’ve ever seen looks mostly the same, in the way that all those “iCompositions” that cropped up after GarageBand came out sounded mostly the same. Don’t get me wrong, I like that these things exist. I just never feel as if I’m using them as they were intended. I also have a good face for radio, much better suited to audio than video.

So the fact that iMovie ‘08 is so drastically different should come as no shock. The goal was always to create a finished and shareable movie in the shortest possible time frame, and not necessarily to offer conventional non-linear editing tools for the achievement of that goal. In fact, if I know Apple, shattering that sacred paradigm was always in the cards. However, waiting so long to ship the “real” iMovie comes with some pain. No more pain than wanting Stanley Kubrick production values on a cable access budget, but pain nonetheless.