You got your shiny new Mac, loaded up with all the cool new applications, so what do you want to do first? Fire up iPhoto? Make a song in Garage Band? But wait, you have a bunch of movies that you shot and never did anything with… Why not fire up iMovie?

Apple’s iLife suite is EXTREMELY cool, and iMovie is a great application for amateur movie makers. You simply import your video, into an event. (Events are a theme in iLife ’08) Once your video is imported, it is drag and drop to make your movie. To trim your movie you will drag the bars to have an in and out point, and using the built in transitions, you can make a professional looking movie with very little effort. The more you use iMovie, the quicker you will be able to crank out better looking movies. The only downside is once you master iMovie, you will want to make your movies more complex. It is then you will realize that you have outgrown iMovie, and you will want something with a little more horsepower.

Enter Final Cut Express, the baby brother of the Pro application Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Express is a little more difficult to get a handle on, as it is based off of a pro tool, but it is $199 US compared to the $1299 US for Final Cut Pro. Also Apple provides some very good tutorials, on their website. (I suggest watching all of them) Once you get a handle on the interface, you will find the application to be incredibly powerful. If you ever worked with any other video editing application, you will quickly find that the timeline editing style makes a lot of sense. In this article I cannot do the application justice to trying to describe it.

If you want to see more about either application, go to Apple.com and check out the tutorials. That is one of the things that Apple excels at, and that is helping their users. Additionally, most apple store will hold free classes on iLife. Check the Apple site for a schedule of classes at a store near you.