Initially, the only way to get iMovie was to buy one of the iMac DV models. Owners of these Macs begged Apple to bundle iMovie with the Mac OS or at least sell it separately. Apple responded to the ruckus by making iMovie free for the downloading. What counts is that iMovie is blissfully simple, surprisingly capable, and absolutely free. Many users have even reported running iMovie on beige Power Macs containing G3 upgrade cards and third-party FireWire cards.
Camcorder compatibility is another story, however.
Stray from this group and you risk problems such as an inability to record a completed project back to tape. A monitor region displays video from a FireWire-connected camcorder and shows a preview of your epic. Below the shelf are four buttons. Depending on the button you click, a tool palette slides out that enables you to add visual transitions between scenes, create titles that can be superimposed over a scene or over black, import music from audio CDs, or add sound effects from iMovie's small library of effects. Across the bottom of the screen is iMovie's timeline-like clip viewer, where you do most of your editing.