PC Magazine - 2009 04.pdf - Libertad Zero - Blog

advanced users will welcome. For example, clicking
on the corner of a clip gives you a list of advanced
features, such as a frame-by-frame precision editor
that helps—a little—with iMovie’s lack of timecodes
and frame markings. Also, the new iMovie supports
two video tracks—sort of. You can cut away
to a second while playing the audio from the first,
embed one track in another to create a picture-inpicture
display, or do simple green-screen compositing.
Like most of iMovie’s features, these could be
more flexible. Two features that improve iMovie’s
integration with iPhoto are Themes (to add titles
and transitions) and Edit to Music (which lets you
synchronize transitions with the beats or lyrics of a
musical score—handy for customized slideshows).
The application still lacks one big capability:
HD support. While you can import HD movies
from most video cameras, you can’t output in HD.
If you’re using a Mac, though, iMovie is pretty much
your only cheap video-editing option.
garageBand ’09
It’s the fifth anniversary of GarageBand, and Apple
seems to be taking a new approach to this recording
app that is part toy, part tool. No one will ever
confuse GarageBand with Pro Tools, and Apple
seems to embrace the difference. In its latest iteration,
GarageBand seems more of a learning tool than
anything else. Sure, you can record some demos on
it, with either real instruments or supplied samples,
adding sounds and loops track by track. But Apple
seems more concerned with showing you the fundamentals
of simple composing, digital recording, and
learning an instrument. It does the last through basic
video lessons called “Learn to Play.” Non-celebrity
lessons are free, but getting Norah Jones to teach you
piano, for example, costs $4.99. The payoff is that
Jones delivers a verse-by-verse how-to in panoramic
widescreen. Underneath her video, the ivories she’s
caressing light up on a virtual keyboard.
Apple has also added virtual amps and pedals
for guitarists to run their recordings through. The
less-compelling change to GarageBand is a feature
that lets you set up a band on a fake stage, choose
the style of music and instruments, and put songs
together. If you want basic music lessons and to get
your feet wet with basic recording-and-looping software,
GarageBand is worth your consideration.
iweb ’09
iWeb has finally grown up and gotten more flexible.
Apple’s easy-to-use, template-based Web site creator
used to have one big downside: It could publish
directly only to MobileMe. But now you can publish
to any server that accepts FTP, which includes most
Web hosts. You can also manage multiple sites, with
each one uploaded to a different location.
iWeb is still not an enterprise-class, or even a
small-business-class, Web-design program. You can’t
get at the basic HTML of your Web pages, and everything
you do must be based on one of the iWeb’s 28
graphical themes and 8 page types. You can insert an
“HTML snippet” as a widget, but it must play nice
with Apple’s existing code. Other widgets let you
drop in RSS feeds, a Google AdSense box, photos
and videos from an iSight camera or YouTube, and,
bizarrely, a graphical countdown. iWeb’s real function—like
iDVD’s—seems to be to create showcases
for your other iLife content, and the program does
that admirably.
idVd 7.0.3
There’s no upgrade to iDVD in iLife ’09. The
upgrades come in iMovie, which now lets you send
projects to iDVD without compressing them to MP4
first, improving the quality. You can also set chapter
stops in iMovie, but you can’t send multiple videos to
iDVD without an intermediate step.
Apple has missed a lot of opportunities here,
such as Blu-ray support and providing a simple way
to consolidate multiple iMovies and iPhoto slideshows
onto one DVD. You can do that, but it involves
exporting, dragging, and dropping—at which point
you might as well use something else. If you’re looking
for a DVD-burning program to use with anything
except iMovie, Roxio’s Toast 10 Titanium is far
superior. But as a way to burn your iMovie projects
to beautifully themed DVDs, it’s still a good choice.
—Tim Gideon and Sascha Segan
Building out Your
site iWeb lets you
drop widgets onto
your page to add complex
objects—such as
rSS feeds—to your site
quickly.
hoMeMade hollYwood
iMovie ’09
supports dual video
tracks, to a limited extent.
You can drop in a
second track while still
playing the first’s audio
or create a greenscreen
effect.
april 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 23