Have you ever edited a movie using the new iMovie 7 or 8? Well I tried a couple of times, and it's a dreadful experience.

I'm not the only one who noticed it.. (actually probably among the last ones). This article from the NY Times is from 2007...

Last week, Apple released a new version of its iLife suite—its $80 package containing iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb and GarageBand. The suite also comes preinstalled on every new Mac.

The enhancements in iPhoto, iWeb and GarageBand are great. But iMovie ‘08 is an utter bafflement.

The new iMovie was, as Apple admits, designed primarily for throwing together movies quickly. It lets you scan through a clip to see what’s in it, isolate the good parts, and rapidly drop them into a sequence.

But iMovie 6 was just as good at those tasks; you could scrub through, chop and drag its clips just as easily. Meanwhile, iMovie ‘08 is incapable of the more sophisticated editing that the old iMovie made so enjoyable.

The new iMovie, for example, is probably the only video-editing program on the market with no timeline—no horizontal, scrolling strip that displays your clips laid end to end, with their lengths representing their durations. You have no indication of how many minutes into your movie you are.

Enough complaints. The good news is, you can time-machine iMovie and get back to the previous version even if you're running OS 10.6. Two simple steps:

1. download a copy of iMovie HD6 from here. If the url is no longer valid, just google it and you'll surely find another mirror.

2. Open up the iMovie package using the 'show package contents' command (by right-clicking on it), double click on the 'Archive.pax.gz' file so to extract its contents, then finally look into the new folder for the familiar iMovie icon. Copy it somewhere else on your HD and get rid of all the other files. Now you've got iMovie 6 too!

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