Hooray for Hollywood or at least my version of it. With iMovie I
have started fulfilling that secret desire I have always had
of really wanting to direct. What is helping me fulfill that
dream along with iMovie are the plug-ins that I can, um, plug
into iMovie [see iMovie 3 review]. This set of plug-ins helped
and hindered that dream of becoming Scorsese!
The test computer ran fine with iMovie running and I did
not see any performance hits with all plug-ins loaded. I loaded
all
4 volumes. [Editor's note: some may notice
a degradation of performance when using iMovie 3 and lots of plug-ins
installed. It depends on your computer.]
 If
you purchase all 4 volumes as a set you will drop $150.00 in one
sitting. This is quite a bit of money for what you seem to be
getting. Some effects look quite nice while others look like
standard amateur transitions and titles. Movie effects are
always a matter of personal taste and preference. I found these
effects run the gamut from bad to good. An example of bad was
called "soft paint" from volume 3 effects. The result looked like
a bad
dream sequence from a low budget horror film. A nice transition
is weave-lattice loose (see screenshot). It provided a nice 3-D transition
instead of the traditional
one-dimensional effect that is prevalent in other effects.
Each
volume came with more transitions than effects so you have
quite a few to choose from. With 4 volumes you have
over a 110 transitions. A big gripe I had with the packages
is the lack of integration. Instead of simply putting them in alphabetical
order each set loaded with a character in front of each set.
That meant scrolling through 4 sets of alphabet looking for
the
effect you wanted. This made the effects hard to find and I
had to print 4 pages of contents from the
company's web site just to know what I had. 
The biggest gripe I had aside from the alphabetizing issue is
the apparent difficulty in previewing. I would choose an
effect and the preview button would not preview the selection.
I had to drag the effect into my movie and let it render
to see it. [Editor's note: this can sometimes
be due to where your position is in the movie. If you are positioned
between clips or at the beginning or ending of the movie, the
preview window won't have enough movie on either side to produce
a preview.
Some plug-ins,
however,
won't
give
you a preview until it is rendered.]
 I would definitely recommend caution when purchasing any of these.
There is tremendous selection but the expense of all 4 volumes
cries for caution. There are a few genuine gems in the packages
and you can see them on the geethree
web site so take the time
to look at each before you buy. Volume 4 comes with an effect
called Slick Motion. It allows panning with high res photos.
It was easy to use but the Kens Burns filter with iMovie seems
to do the same.
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