Apple’s iMovie used to be a fantastic video editor, and Apple frequently used it as a showcase for the creative expression and media production that was possible on a Mac. Now, iMovie is frozen in a state of disrepair, and it could really use a modern overhaul.

iMovie dates back to 1999, when it was created as an application for making home and classroom movies, primarily with digital camcorders using the FireWire standard. It was bundled with iMac DV and iMac DV Special Edition computers, and completed movies could be saved to the computer or camcorder’s storage—the latter was helpful for connecting to a TV with a VHS recorder.

In 2003, Apple introduced the iLife suite, which bundled several Mac applications for media creation and management into one package. The first edition included iMovie 3 with its new video and sound effects, along with iDVD 3 for burning DVDs, and iPhoto 2 for managing photo libraries. The iLife apps all worked together—you could bring photos from iPhoto into an iMovie project, then use iDVD to export the video to a DVD movie. iTunes was also included in the iLife suite, but it was always a free download outside of iLife, too.

The iLife suite continued to be updated nearly every year, eventually adding GarageBand for audio editing and iWeb for web publishing. iMovie received many big updates over the years, including a controversial redesign with iMovie 7 (in iLife ’08) that many people saw as a downgrade. Apple ended up making the previous iMovie 6 (pictured below) a free download for iMovie 7 users, and subsequent updates fixed some of the shortcomings in iMovie 7.

Apple eventually moved the iLife apps to individual downloads on the Mac App Store, and all the apps later became free downloads and were bundled with all new Mac, iPhone, and iPad devices. iPhoto was eventually replaced with the iCloud-synchronized Photos app, iTunes became Apple Music, and iWeb and iDVD were discontinued—leaving iMovie and GarageBand as the remaining iLife apps we have today.

The Problems With iMovie

iMovie has not received a major update since iMovie 10 in 2013. There have been a few minor improvements since then, and it was received an update to run natively on Apple Silicon when the first M1 Mac computers arrived in 2020, but not much else has happened. It can still be a usable video editor for certain projects, but it now falls flat for many simple tasks.

iMovie only supports a 16:9 aspect ratio, so it can’t be used for editing vertical short-form videos or projects in common 4:2 or 1:1 ratios. Imported media is mostly limited to videos in MPEG format (such as H.264 or H.265/HEVC), and videos in common formats like WebM or AV1 need to be converted first. There is support for green screen/chroma key, but not automatic masking/background removal, like many other video editors now include. Audio editing is incredibly limited. Freezes and crashes are common. There are no export format options besides a vague ‘Quality’ dropdown menu and a resolution option. The list goes on.

Apple always intended iMovie to be a more basic video editor that was easy to use, leaving the more complex features and tools for Final Cut Pro and Apple’s competitors. However, even for the more basic tasks that iMovie is supposed to handle, it’s less usable than competitors like Microsoft Clipchamp, or even the built-in video editors in apps like TikTok and Instagram.

The other complicated factor here is QuickTime. Apple previously intended QuickTime Player to be the main tool for simple video trimming, removing or replacing audio, and other basic tasks, mostly through the paid QuickTime Pro package. Some of those options still exist in the modern QuickTime Player, but trimming videos or removing audio usually requires re-encoding the file, and QuickTime shares iMovie’s limitations with media formats.

It’s not hard to see why Apple has left iMovie alone for much of the past decade. Video production has increasingly moved to smartphones and tablets, where most people just use the camera and editing tools built into platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Professional video editors are also more accessible than they were in the 2000s. DaVinci Resolve is a fantastic editor that is free for personal use, with Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple’s Final Cut Pro, and many other options existing as paid alternatives. Those applications have more of a learning curve than iMovie, but there are countless free tutorials and resources available, and they don’t necessarily require high-end computers.

iMovie occupies a narrow middle ground between TikTok-style content editing and professional video production, and iMovie doesn’t even fit that use case well. So, what can Apple do to fix it? What does a modern and useful iMovie look like?

The Modern iMovie

Microsoft’s Clipchamp is great at modern simple video editing, and I think an overhauled iMovie should take a few lessons from it. Clipchamp can handle multi-track video editing with effects and transitions, just like iMovie, but it also has more features common in smartphone-based editors and tools. You can add automatic speech-to-text captions, edit in a vertical aspect ratio with different crop and background fill options, remove backgrounds from clips, export to GIF, and more.

I would also like to see iMovie support more audio and video formats, like Apple has already done for Final Cut Pro. Native support for WebM and AV1 would also be useful, but that’s probably not likely, given Apple has been remarkably slow at supporting those formats in Safari and other applications.

Finally, it would make a lot of sense for a revamped iMovie to be identical across Mac and iPad. The mobile version of iMovie isn’t quite the same application—projects created on an iPad or iPhone can be moved to a Mac, but not the other way around—and there are some missing features. Final Cut Pro for iPad is in a similar situation, but that’s more understandable, as some Final Cut projects can use third-party plugins and other complex features.

I’d really like to see Apple give iMovie a proper revamp for the modern age. In the meantime, I’ll stick to Final Cut Pro.