iMovie Issues

I really like Apple’s iMovie a lot. But there are some real problems that I keep running into. Some of them I can work around. Some of them I just find myself plain stuck!

• Placing titles on the movie:
  • It many times does not allow me to place titles on the time line like I would like. It will allow me to place at beginning or end but usually not in the middle.
  • When it gets placed on video, the length the title plays is usually way too long and it puts it in the wrong place.
  • I can fortunately drag the title to the right place and change the duration but it is a very tedious thing to do.
• Sound:
  • It would be nice to extend the fade in or out length to a longer value if desired.
  • It would be nice to be able to adjust the volume in and out on different parts of a sound clip and not have to split things apart outside of iMovie.

Some frustrating things I can’t so far figure out how to work around:

• I can’t really do any overlaying of video (video playing on top of video with some translucence inside of iMovie).
• I purchased iWork because of the presentation software (Keynote). I saw that it exports to Quicktime files (which can be imported into iMovie). Unfortunately I found out that iMovie grays out these Quicktime files and I can’t use them! This was really a bummer because a figured out how to create layers of video in Keynote and have it play just like I want it to… If I could just get it to import into iMovie! Arrrgh! That was SOOOO disappointing!  Apple, please make this work! If someone can direct me to software that gets that Quicktime file generated by Keynote into iMovie I will be very grateful!