iMovie, Apple’s little video editing app that could, is kind of a nice bonus to the iLife suite. I rarely edit video, but when I do it’s nice to have a, more or less, full featured editor handy.
Apple changed the video editing game with iMovie ‘08 by taking out the traditional timeline view and leaving the actual editing to a drag-and-drop interface. This angered some and liberated others. Me? It didn’t matter that much. It seemed to make editing videos much easier but tweaking fine details and making pinpoint cuts very difficult.
Precision Editor
iMovie ‘09 brought some minor refinements to the new system introduced in the ‘08 model, but ones that raise the video editing bar. Added back, in the form of a “Precision Editor,” is a modified timeline that is very simple, yet allows for very precise cuts and timing. It’s very, very cool. In fact, the Precision Editor is so smooth, that it seemed to make the whole video editing process much easier.
Precision Editor
I broke iMovie ‘09 in editing a video for Operation BLIND. The original video was the same speech given by nine different kids. It amounted to about thirty minutes of footage. The task was to edit the video together so that entire two minute speech was given with a different person speaking each line. A tall task. But with this new Precision Editor I had the whole thing chopped and put together in a few hours. Thats it. I had planned to work on this for most of the week, but it took a few hours — with a break for lunch and a trip the drum store. (To see the complete video please visit the link above.) Needless to say, I was impressed.
Dynamic Themes
If you’re familiar with iDVD (which oddly wasn’t touched with this update to iLife) then you get the basic idea of Dynamic Themes. Basically it’s a themed video with drag-and-drop zones for videos or images as well as specialized title graphics and transitions to match the theme. This thing is pretty incredible.
It’s very easy to use; you can simply select a group of pictures or videos, drag them into an empty project with a set theme, and iMovie will place all the videos/images into the drop zones and add the specialized transitions and title cards. That’s it. You can refine it and tweak it from there, but you don’t have to. And let me tell you, these themes are slick. I’ll be using the photo album one for the annual senior video I make for the youth group and I can’t wait to put it together.
The only thing I don’t like about the Dynamic Themes is that there’s only six of them. As Apple expands upon the idea and continues to update iMovie, I’m sure they’ll add more. I just wish there were more to play with now. They’re that cool.
Animated Travel Maps
This new feature is also known as the Indiana Jones effect — you know, where the little red line goes from airport to airport on the map while the travel music plays? It’s a little gimmicky but still pretty cool. It seems just about every global airport is available in the setup, along with a mileage between points (in case you were wondering). The only thing I couldn’t figure out how to do was have a map show multiple stops. Not a big deal, but I might not have been looking hard enough.
Final Thoughts
iMovie ‘09 is pretty much a knock out. If you’re a video editing hobbyist like me, you’ll be very happy with the changes made. If you’re an editing purist, you might be pleased with the direction Apple is heading. Sure, it’s not Final Cut Pro, but as part of a $79 suite of apps, it’s well, well worth the cost of upgrading. To put it in context, I can see paying $79 for iMovie ‘09 by itself. It’s that good.
iMovie is a part of iLife ‘09 and sells for $79 (or a little less through Amazon — and I get a small kickback). This is part two in a series reviewing iLife ‘09. Look for a review of GarageBand sometime in the foreseeable future.
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When iLife ‘09 was announced at this years MacWorld, I was extremely excited about the new features being added to iPhoto. I even purchased a small GPS device so I could take advantage of the geotagging feature. Needless to say that when the package arrived last week, I couldn’t wait to try it out. Want to know if it’s worth the upgrade? Read on.
Faces
I’ve got to say this was a feature a long time coming. Tagging someone in the keywords of a photo is one thing, but actually tagging their face is another entirely. iPhoto ‘09 allows you to do just that but takes it one better, it uses some sort of facial recognition algorithm to connect pictures based on who is in them. At least that’s the theory.
In actuality, iPhoto seems to detect about 75% of faces. This percentage is very good in my opinion. The system has no trouble at all finding faces in portraits/close ups but in candid or group shots it’s a bit spotty. If the subject is wearing a hat, glasses or even has hair in front of their face sometimes the system doesn’t recognize the face. What iPhoto doesn’t do all that well is figure out who’s in the picture.
Over the last week I’ve gone through the 10 or so years worth of pictures in my library and have tried to tag the faces of most of the pictures in there. This has resulted in nearly 150 different people, each with somewhere from 2 or 3 pictures to a whole lot. On average I’d say each ‘face’ has about 10 to 15 images. Now I don’t know if it’s because there are a lot of different people or not enough source material for each person, but I’d say iPhoto only gets about 25% of the facial recognition correct. I will say that the first person I trained iPhoto to recognize was me (is that conceited or what?) and after tagging 3 or 4 photos, it was able to find a dozen or so more and so on.
In theory the system is awesome and perhaps as I give it more input it’ll get better, but the facial recognition just isn’t quite where I’d hoped it would have been. I’m not sure if the technology behind the recognition is something that could be updated through Software Update, but it’d be interesting to see if Apple improves upon it in the future.
Places Map
Places is iPhoto’s implementation of geotagging — the ability to tag photos with GPS coordinates. This feature is pretty much smooth as butter — quote that. I was able to tag the few hundred events in my library in only a few short hours (it would have been quicker but I’m anal and wanted to make sure pictures taken in transit were tagged different than the rest). The result is a cool map view for each image and a very cool map showing where all of your pictures were taken.
Finding locations is pretty easy and there’s a fair amount of default locations built in — all cities and a good amount of landmarks/points of interest. Adding additional locations is just as easy and uses a Google Maps search engine. If that doesn’t find what you’re looking for, you can always just drag the pin where you want it to go.
It’ll be interesting to see how the map grows as I take more pictures with accurate GPS location information, and not just tag with the generic city location.
Location of individual picture.
Online Sharing
Newly integrated into iPhoto is the ability to easily upload and share photos on Facebook and Flickr. It is a very easy process, select photos and pick which service to use. The first time you use each service you have to activate each account — it takes about 30 seconds. Once everything is up and running, sharing the photos is dead simple.
One thing I was interested in was the advertised two-way communication between iPhoto and Facebook with respect to Faces tagging. According to Apple, if you tag a face in iPhoto and upload to Facebook, it’s already tagged. Likewise, if someone tags a photo in Facebook it transmits that to iPhoto. All of this works as advertised except for one feature that you would think would be standard.
When I upload a photo that has been tagged with a face in iPhoto it does tag that photo in Facebook. However, it doesn’t determine if that name is a friend or not so it doesn’t actually link to their account. For example, I tagged a photo of me in iPhoto and when it was uploaded it was tagged but in name only. Couldn’t click on my name to view my profile, etc. It was the same with all the photos I uploaded. If I tagged them in Facebook and re-synced with iPhoto, I was given the “Is this so and so” confirmation. It seems that’s the best way to go about this. Kind of a silly extra step, but one that seems necessary for it all to work properly.
The only other glitch I found here was when I tried to delete a shared album with Flickr. It showed the progress bar, but nothing happened. I quit out and restarted iPhoto and then tried again and it worked — in iPhoto. When I pulled up Flickr the pictures were all still there. I had to delete them using Flickr’s “organize” feature. Again, a strange hassle.
Final Thoughts
So is it worth it? Well, there are some things I was disappointed in, but for the most part I’m pretty happy with iPhoto ‘09. I wish the Faces technology was a bit more refined, but it’s made up for in the Places feature. I’d like to see how future updates and Apple’s infamous “bug fixes” effect iPhoto’s usability. I feel like it’s a good basis to start from and it should continue to grow from here.
iPhoto is a part of iLife ‘09 and sells for $79 (or a little less through Amazon — and I get a small kickback). Over the next few days weeks I’ll go through iLife’s other apps of note, GarageBand and iMovie, and review them as well.
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Today Apple dropped a few bombshells announcing that they were ceasing their participation in the annual MacWorld conference and this year Steve Jobs would not be giving the keynote. In an equally surprising announcement Apple announced it was also canceling Christmas. Tomorrow I’m sure Apple will announce it is canceling the value of it’s stock. High-oh! While Apple is currently in the mood to cancel things that have been a huge part of the company for years — I mean introduction of the iPod, iPhone and the iPod Hi-Fi — I’ve got a suggestion of something else they should cancel: the Dashboard.
The Dashboard has been a staple of OS X since 10.4 Tiger was released. It’s concept — that you can have different widgets that do different things — has been repeated all over the internet and now in Windows Vista. With the influx of Web 2.0 website offering basically the same functionality, the Dashboard has become outdated and, dare I say, useless. I can’t remember the last time I actually opened the Dashboard willingly — the occasional accidental F12 key strike does the trick — nor actually used a widget. 10.5 Leopard brought a new feature to the Dashboard, the ability to create your own widgets from any website you wanted using a button on Safari. I can safely say, I’ve never used this feature. It’s a good idea, but again, basically useless.
The problem is not the concept, that in and of itself is okay, the problem is usage. It’s a screen that runs in the background and, when pulled up, is ready to go. The problem here is that it sucks up memory causing the entire system to slow. The other problem — and here’s the kicker — is that why would I launch the Dashboard to see what time it is, look at my calendar, check a contact’s email address or see what the weather is when I can simply do that without launching the Dashboard. So maybe part of the problem is the concept after all.
So here’s what I propose: Apple cancel the Dashboard. 10.6 Snow Leopard is set to debut sometime next year and is not actually offering any new features, but rather a promise to slim down the operating system and make it run much more efficiently. Could there be a more perfect time to get rid of something that causes bloat and inefficiency? While people will miss MacWorld, and probably Christmas too, I’m not sure if I know many people who would miss the Dashboard.
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Today Apple made some waves and refreshed all of their iPods and dropped iTunes 8 onto the intertubes. Considering none of the “announcements” were surprises due to Apple’s new lack of leak plugs, I was ready to try out the Genius feature before I knew that I could. Did you follow that? I hope so because I’m not going to try and re-write it. Anyway, the Genius feature is pretty good, pretty intuitive and puts together a nice playlist based on the selected song. It couldn’t, though, put together a playlist based on the Dr. Horrible soundtrack. Oh well.
But this isn’t going to be a review of iTunes 8 and the Genius feature. It’s a look at the name itself. I’ve got a huge problem with it. Other sites around the web are arguing over Apple’s use of the word “funnest” in their new iPod marketing, but I think the use of Genius is a much bigger mistake on Apple’s part.
Anyone who has ever walked into an Apple Store knows that the word Genius is not new to Apple. Apple uses the word to describe it’s tech support people. Computer broke? iPod showing the sad face? Go see a Genius at your local Genius Bar. Makes sense considering a genius should know what to do. Apple has effectively branded the word genius to demote support for your Mac. Now, with the launch of iTunes 8, they are telling us that it also means something that can pick songs for you. I mean, it’d be stupid to walk into the closest Apple Store, wait in line, and then ask a Genius to recommend some music for you. But maybe that’s what Apple want’s us all to do.
I might be looking too much into this, but I think Apple is making a mistake here. The iTunes feature could have easily been called something else leaving the Genius moniker for the support folks at the local store. What do you think? Did Apple make a mistake using the word Genius or am I just overreacting? Let me know in the comments.
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Ok, so I don’t even know what to do with this. Jerry Seinfeld was tipped to be the new spokesperson for Microsoft. I guess they wanted to combat the very clever Mac vs. PC ads that Apple has been running for a few years now. I like Jerry Seinfeld, I even liked the HP commercial he did last summer, but this… well, let’s just say I don’t have a clue what the point is nor how it’s supposed to sell Windows. In fact, I don’t really know what to say about it. I’m kind of dumbfounded that such a large, and at times brilliant, company could think this made sense:
Maybe I’m not seeing this right. Maybe my Apple love has blinded me. Maybe. What do you think? Does this commercial make a bit of sense to you? Let me know in the comments.
Via MacUser.
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Less Stuff More Stuff