I want to do something that I thought was going to be quite simple.

I have a video of my band on a DVD and I wanted to edit it as follows:
1. Cut the video into single songs.
2. Normalise the audio, boost it up so the peaks are at 0db and maybe add a bit of compression to even out the volume.
3. Fade the audio in from silence and out to silence at the beginning and end (setting the time for each fade individually).
4. Fade the video in from black at the start and out to black at the end with a separate fade time for each end.
5. Save each song as a separate file that can be uploaded to YouTube, Facebook etc.

I already have QuickTime Pro 7 and iMovie 09.

Unfortunately iMovie seems to be the most unintuitive piece of rubbish ever. I can't get either the audio or video fades to work. Is there something really obvious that I am doing wrong or is that iMovie is simply not up to the task and I need to use a proper video editing app like Premier?

Help...

It used to be up to all that, but Apple have dumbed it down over the years. The last genuinely useful version was iMovie HD (v6), which Apple did make available as a free download when iLife 08 was released. I might still have the installer somewhere.

To be honest, I haven't used iMovie much since iLife 08 but it's not as good as it used to be. With iMovie HD, you could easily split footage, fade audio in and out by dragging the audio line up and down, boost audio by up to 150% etc. most of that went with iMovie 08 and later. It might be hidden away somewhere, but like I say I couldn't get my head round how it worked.

Have a look at Lightworks - http://www.lwks.com
It's free, and fairly heavy duty. The free version has a limit on it's output to 720p and MPEG-4 files, which should be fine for your needs.

I've been able to normalise and boost the audio OK, although some way of using AU plugins would have been useful so I could add a little bit of multi band compression to the whole audio track to get the vocals to sit better in the mix.

However I simply can't get the audio fade in and out to work. There are settings for this that can be found in the inspector palette - audio tab, but they don't actually appear to have any effect on the final output.

Similarly with the fade to and from black. No matter what I do the effects don't appear on the actual final movie. I'm sure I must just be doing something wrong and as soon as I know the right way to do it everything will look and sound great, but right now I think I'm doing the right thing but I can't see or hear what I'm doing having any effect.

Thanks! I'll download and check it out tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vRlO0qz2r4 - for a quick start guide to it. It's a little different to a lot of OS X native stuff, but I think you should be able to cope.

With the effects in iMovie 08 and later, I think you have to click and drag to select the area of the footage that you want to apply the effect first.

I had to edit a load of videos for a presentation a few months back. I tried it on the iMac I was using, but iMovie was just getting in the way. In the end, I did it on a Windows 7 machine with Microsoft MovieMaker!

One of my problems was having to take video from various sources (Elgato Game Capture HD (iPad and Android tablet app captures in full HD), Adobe Captivate and our company film on DVD). iMove baulked at the Captivates and didn't much like the Elgato either, even though the Elgato captured onto the Mac!

Switching to the PC, I actually had to re-export the Elgato film on Windows - which in fact then turned out to be something that iMovie could use! Why iMovie couldn't use the Mac version of the video is beyond me, you would have thought that Elgato Mac software would export to a format that the Mac can work with...