I edited my first full-length movie on iMovie10 yesterday.

Very smooth!

First, I had mixed media. I had an hour of AVCHD files, shot last week. I also had 3 .MOV files, from previous shoots with the model in 2005.

I imported the video files into the iMovie Library, and was able to work with them immediately! No converting or waiting on background conversion or rendering.

Selecting the in/out points in each file was easy. There is a poster image object representing each video file, and you scroll your mouse (no clicking) over the poster image to see the video in the file, then point-click-drag-release to select the range (in/out) of the video in the poster that you want to add to your timeline.

I assembled the clips. One scene was shot portrait instead of landscape, so I put a background under it to fill out the full frame. That was easy, backgrounds are built in - or I could have used one of my own.

I did a picture-in-picture with one scene, to merge the video of the models hole getting a massage, with a JO event. That was quite easy.The only part of that that was a struggle is that I needed to crop the JO video, but the crop tool is "fixed" in terms of width-height proportions. The crop isn't individually left, right, top, bottom, it is a rectangle. I hope they fix that.

I did come color correction, white balance using eye dropper. Very slick.

Next, I need to do audio. I have experience doing audio with iMovie10 for Tutorials, so I am not approaching that with any in trepidation.

Next month, I trade in my MacMini desktop for the newest version, which makes me eligible for the free iMovie11. All iMovie versions are free, depending on release date of your hardware. So I have free iMovie on my iPad, MacBookPro and MacMini.

I might then consider FCP X. But the movies I make, just don't require much more than what I did yesterday with iMovie10, usually much less!

The only thing I am disappointed with iMovie10 right now, is that to Export the movie to a file, anything more custom than the built-in output options for YouTube, Facebook media, is a handful of choices for mp4 video. No 720x480 full-size .mov. It estimates that 1-hour of mp4 video will be 1.5GB, but as we all know, 1-hour of 720x480 NTSC .MOV is 13GB!

The 1.3GB mp4 is fine for making a DVD, but VOD platforms do encourage fill-size .MOVs as well.