On Tuesday I chatted with Chuck Joiner about what’s new in iMovie ’11 and my TidBITS article, “15 Secrets of iMovie ’11” for the MacVoices podcast. Chuck is always great to talk to, and indulged me when I found myself having to back up and explain things like rolling shutter, CMOS camera sensors, and interlaced video footage.
Jeff Carlson has been spending lots of time with the new iMovie ‘11, and has discovered a number of useful, cool and largely undocumented features. Jeff discusses the under-publicized return of the timeline (even if it isn’t called a timeline), the usefulness of Movie Trailer and other effects, and then dives into things you didn’t know, including rolling shutter fix, morse code in a theme, and several other minor but tasteful additions. iMovie ‘11 still isn’t good with interlaced video; Jeff explains what that means to you and how to work around it, and why iMovie ‘11 is finally almost like the long-dead iMovie HD.
Catch the podcast here: MacVoices #10125: Jeff Carlson Looks At The Known and Unknown Features of iMovie ‘11
Jeff Carlson | Never Enough Coffee Creations 
Great review on iMovie 11 – could you answer me a question about the project themes. Can they be edited? If so what software would you recommend? Could I use keynote, garageband?
Themes can’t be easily edited, no. I imagine if one were a programmer, you could unpack the theme files using Xcode and alter them, but I’m not a programmer.
In this podcast, you mention the dv quality loss issue has not been resolved in iMovie ’11. You also indicate that you need to convert the video to progressive as a work around. Do you have the steps and/or settings required to make the conversion?
I don’t have a workflow for doing the conversion, as I haven’t had time to explore it.
I would love to know a solution? Will you post if you establish one?
Yes, I’m just swamped right now. Though that could make for a good addition to my “iMovie ’11 Project Book” that I’m working on.