I managed to schedule a One-to-One training session at the local Apple Store today. The first available date was, sure, the Monday of the week following Christmas, December 29. What a coincidence, a date that follows the ultimate purchase and return week.

Anyway, for my meeting I’ll try to make some sense of what Apple has done to the iMovie in iLife ’08, at least what I can understand during my 50-minute session. This baseline movie app for creative types who still don’t have Final Cut Express in their budget got gutted in its latest version, all to make it behave more like the Final Cut series. Somewhere in Apple’s software management this made sense, probably because nobody there ever spent three years working with the perfectly-useful iMovie from 2006.

I probably will come away from the training with a yen to move up from iMovie to the $199 Final Cut Express. That’s one thing you could learn from 50 minutes of training.