Who among the maddening crowd of Mac users does not use something in iLife? iTunes? Yep. iPhoto? Sure. iMovie? Naturally. iTunes alternatives don’t do as much. iPhoto alternatives usually cost money. Are there iMovie alternatives? After all, iMovie is drag and drop, comes with themes and transitions. What if you want more?
PulpMotion Make Out
The only real problem with iMovie is that it’s more of a quick editor and project manager than a classy, custom-themed photo and movie creator. For that, you need PulpMotion.
What’s nice about iMovie’s drag and drop operation is that you get nice looking finished products with half a dozen themes, complete with auto inserted transitions between scenes.
What’s bad about iMovie is that your iMovie creation will look about the same as every other Mac user’s iMovie creation. PulpMotion ends the commonplace with more than 80 themes and presets.
Features, Elegance, Creativity
I like to think of iMovie as an iLife app created by an engineer. It’s efficient, but not much on creativity. PulpMotion (and the advanced big brother, PulpMotion Advanced) adds the creative touch your video and photo productions.
Getting started is completely different than iMovie (click any image for a larger pop up view).
PulpMotion has a dazzling array of themes. Choose one and you get options, too. Once you’ve chosen a theme, PulpMotion opens up in the editor mode. After that, it’s point and click and drag and drop. The Media Manager lets you drag photos, sounds, movie clips to the timeline (similar to iMovie, so it’s familiar, but without the project management tools).
The timeline is somewhat similar to the iMovie timeline, but with fewer visual cues. However, the process is the same. Drag and drop.
Easy, so far, right? There’s plenty of control for each photo, audio, or video clip in the sidebar. PulpMotion’s advantages are substantial. Open multiple documents at the same time. Create an entire photo or video presentation in minutes. Add more than one audio track for background music. Every feature is drag and drop or point and click.
The PulpMotion editor handles standard IN and OUT points so you can get tighter edits. Even rotate and crop photos. The real fun begins with the Export option. Once your creation is complete, what will you do? Export to QuickTime. Export to a screensaver or Garageband or iMovie or iWeb, or send the finished production as an iPhone video.
The reason to move to PulpMotion is basic. If you’ve outgrown iMovie, find it limiting, need more themes and transitions, and more bells and whistles, then the options are slim. Final Cut Express and Final Cut Studio are full-fledged video editors, but not for the amateur. PulpMotion gives you more tools, more features, yet the whole layout and design is familiar to iMovie users.
Since you can try out PulpMotion check the Advanced version, too. It adds additional features, including Aperture and Lightroom integration, zone editing, audio synchronization, and a story telling option.