At the last Discovery Week at Mid Valley, I was lucky enough to be a Mac Evangelist telling people why they should buy a Mac. I had to do demos of the Mac and one of the demos that really caught people’s attention was iMovie ’09. That piqued my interest to learn more about iMovie ’09.

Most of us have the wonderful iLife suite on our Macs but we never really use it. iMovie is a real gem and the whole suite is a big selling point, especially if you’re the creative kind. So here’s a quick intro into iMovie to encourage you to give it a try.

iMovie is Apple’s consumer level video editing application. Despite being a ‘consumer’ application, it’s really powerful and chocked full of features. Here’s an example home movie that showcases the kind of quality videos you can create with iMovie.

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This short film, “Run” was produced by the Discovery Week boys. (Jump ahead to 1.15 in the video to skip the pre-roll—click on the timeline).The boys used almost all of the iMovie features in this video, including:

• Stylish transitions
• Titles and supers
• Video effects
• Image stabilisation
• Sound effects and audio editing
• Exporting the video to YouTube

I believe the video used only the standard iMovie sound effects, and even with that it successfully created a spooky atmosphere for the video. The only feature that I think wasn’t used was iMovie’s green screen effect. Yes, you get green screen and image stabilisation in the free iMovie.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t take much to put together a cool video like the above. All you need is a video camera (or even your point and shoot in video mode), iMovie and some creativity.

And don’t worry about iMovie being difficult to use. It’s really very intuitive like all Apple software. At the most, just view a few of the iMovie tutorials on Apple’s website to get started.

** Shameless self plug **

Sometimes you need an incentive to put together your own movie and taking part in a contest is a good incentive. Here’s my entry for DiGi’s Pimp My Broadband contest. Best video wins a MacBook! Think you can do better than mine?

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P.S. I would really appreciate a vote if you like my movie –> Please Vote!

In conclusion, iMovie is really fun and easy to use. You really should try it out. Once again, iMovie is part of the iLife suite that comes free with every Mac. This means you already have it. Go ahead and poke around in your Applications folder and give it a spin. Here’s to you becoming the next Steven Spielberg (or the next YouTube sensation)!