Share and Share iLife ‘06
- Article 52 of 53
- iCreate, March 2006
If you want to share your movies, music and photos with someone, iLife 06 is now the best way to do it.
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | All 4 Pages
Also on the list is Magic iDVD, a way to create DVDs in a single screen, if you’re too busy to cope with drop zones and menus. It’s really just a better version of the existing “One Click DVD” option, but it doesn’t really save you all that much extra time. It’s nice, but not fantastic.
Enhanced map views are, erm, slightly better map views, so we’ll skirt quickly over them to autofill drop zones. Once you’ve added all your movies to your DVD and selected a theme, now all you have to do is click on a button and all the drop zones will be populated with your movies. We estimate this will save you almost a whole minute per project.
So ignore these “new” features and concentrate on what’s actually new. Widescreen support is the welcome extra, given widescreen televisions have been pretty common for over seven years now. However, since most other DVD authoring software can’t cope with widescreen either, iDVD has still managed to get a slow march on the others.
All the new iDVD 6 themes, of which there are many, are compatible with both widescreen and 4:3 projects. Older themes aren’t, however, so you’ll have to hope the new themes are better than the ones you’re using if you’re hoping to create widescreen DVDs.
But that’s about it by way of new features. Despite this, iDVD remains the top DVD authoring package for the Mac short of Apple’s DVD Studio Pro. It may be resting on its laurels a little, but the new themes are excellent and widescreen support is something worth upgrading for. Nevertheless, we would have liked a little more bite and a little less repackaging of existing features.
I’m ready for my close up
Let’s end this on a high though. iMovie HD fills in more than a few gaps in iMovie’s featureset. At last, you can do decent titles that match iDVD’s excellent menu themes and they’re as easy to use. Just drag your clips to a title theme and iMovie will do the rest. Real-time titling effects make it easy to experiment with titles as well.
Just when you thought podcasting and photocasting were enough, iMovie HD now includes videocasting. As you might guess, that’s a podcast for videos. With iMovie HD, you can add chapter markers and hyperlinks within iMovie and then publish your videocast with iWeb. Problematically, anyone watching your videocast will need QuickTime 7, rather than one of the more common codecs used in videocasts. But with videocasting still a relatively rare activity, not many people will notice just yet.
Audio also gets a boost. Building on the slightly anaemic tools of iMovie HD 5, version six gets eight new audio effects and a noise reducer for cancelling out stray noises, such as camcorder whir and wind. There’s a graphic equalizer for balancing the soundtrack. And, of course, you can export your movie to GarageBand if none of that is enough for you.
If movies are your thing, then iMovie HD 6 is a reasonably impressive upgrade. We’d have liked a few more under the hood changes, such as support for muxed MPEG movies, particularly since many digital cameras use that format for movie-capture. But what is on offer is worth its share of the iLife upgrade cost.
Overall, iLife 06 is a decent enough upgrade. If iPhoto or GarageBand are your only interest and you don’t want to join the new pod/photo/videocast revolution, we wouldn’t blame you for holding off until next year for the upgrade. £55 for a single upgrade is maybe a little too much for most people, but it’s roughly the same price as two pieces of shareware. If there are two apps in 06 with the features you need, it’s a good investment. But if you use them all, that’s £11 for each program and they’re certainly all worth that. If your Mac really is your digital lifestyle hub, iLife 06 will give it a turn.
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | All 4 Pages