Why iMovie sucks pt 1: it handles video & other media differently.

I opened iMovie up to tweak a few things on a new Jay ThePal video I've been cutting over the weekend only to discover it's lost the audio tracks I've added to the title cards. This is because, while iMovie copies video files into a kind of project directory, it doesn't do anything with pictures or audio files. As a result, if you move the original audio file (as I did) it'll be missing the next time you open your project in iMovie (see attached screencap). Ironically, I had moved the two audio files into the project directory myself. Whoops. Nice one, iMovie!

Why does iMovie work this way? Beats me. It's just one of the many annoying things you get to deal with when using software designed by people who only think they are smarter than you. (This was one thing Windows software programmers never seemed to do, believe it or not.)

Incidentally, I use iMovie (for now) because it consumes less resources than Final Cut and has very handy preset titles. However, thanks to the amount of time I've wasted dealing with iMovie's little idiosyncrasies I'm contemplating going back to FCP or perhaps just cutting everything on my netbook's copy of Windows Movie Maker since (surprisingly enough) it seems to have much fewer quirks to deal with. The only drawback is that it's Windows and seems to export only WMV. Blech.