Product Description

iLife '08 a major update to Apple's award-winning suite of digitallifestyle applications delivers significant upgrades to iPhotoiWeb GarageBand and iDVD plus a completely reinvented iMovie thatoffers a revolutionary new way to enjoy edit and share y

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #380 in Software
• Brand: Apple
• Model: MB015Z/A
• Released on: 2007-08-08
• Platforms: Mac OS X, Mac
• Format: DVD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .25 pounds

Customer Reviews

iPhoto '08 Is Excellent, Let Down By iMovie '08
iLife '08 comprises 5 applications for £55, so £11 per application. For 4 out of 5 of these applications, iLife '08 is an improvement over its predecessor iLife '06 (there is no iLife '07) and a great upgrade. However, iMovie '08 takes 2 steps back from iMovie HD, in an attempt to take 1 step forward. More on that later.

iPhoto '08 is excellent and worth £55 alone. It has some excellent new features such as Events, the .Mac Web Gallery, Unified Search, New Calendar and book styles, Theme-based home printing and new Editing Tools. The editing tools are worth pointing out as iPhoto now does something very clever when you edit a photo. It remembers every single alteration you made to it, in a truly non-destructive way, down to the positions of the adjustment sliders, the exact angle of straightening, the cropping, everything. So, for example, if you increase the contrast of a photo to +10 and then quit iPhoto, when you re-open it iPhoto remembers that the contrast was set to +10 and you can adjust it down to +5. There's no need to save, or remember what adjustments you made; iPhoto takes care of it all. This enables you to go editing crazy, rapidly cropping, straightening and fixing colour casts on all your photos, without worrying about destroying the original or getting the edits perfect the first time. Brilliant.

iMovie '08 has nothing in common with the previous version, iMovie HD. It is a brand new application, starting from scratch. While it introduces some excellent new features, it loses a lot of the control and creative power of iMovie HD. The new video library system is great, automatically capturing and archiving your MiniDV, HDV and AVCHD camcorder footage. It's like iPhoto, but for your home video. The whole of iMovie '08 works in real-time, even with mixed format footage in the same project, processing all of the edits, transitions and titles on the fly. Very impressive. The new tools for skimming and dragging make editing extremely easy, enabling you to chuck a series of clips into whatever order you want in an incredibly short amount of time. Due to the new library system, the video project files are now tiny, since they only contain a list of instructions, not the actual video files. This means you can make 10-20 different projects, but using minimal disk space, since all the projects reference the same collection of video files. Plus, iMovie '08 incorporates an automated YouTube uploader, offering to put your projects directly on YouTube where they can be viewed by millions, literally. The most viewed video on YouTube currently has 71 million views!

Where iMovie '08 goes wrong is in what's missing. Gone is the traditional timeline view, making editing video to music very very difficult. Gone are all of the slick real-time video effects that made iMovie HD so impressive. Gone are most of the transitions. Gone is the ability to record your project back to MiniDV tape. Gone is the ability to maintain interlacing (iMovie '08 automatically de-interlaces everything, reducing the fluidity and clarity of MiniDV video). iMovie '08 is clearly aimed at the YouTube generation, not the DVD generation.

The good news is, iMovie HD is available as a free download to anyone that owns iLife '08. So, nothing is really lost. iMovie '08 clearly has brought down the reputation of the iLife suite, turning a 5 star product into a 4 or 3 star product. If Apple have any sense they will focus all of their iLife '09 efforts into iMovie, adding back the missing features and turning a disappointing application into an excellent application. Apple are extremely fast and focused at pumping out new software, so I wouldn't dismiss iMovie just yet. Watch this space...

IMovie
The new '08 version of iMovie is ultra simple to use and you can genuinely edit a movie in minutes. And, as a bonus you get to keep iMovie '06 or download for free from Apple so you get the best of both worlds!

The changes to the rest of the iLife apps are worth the cost in themselves. iPhoto and iMovie with skimming and events is just amazing. Mac gallery and YouTube uploading is a dream to use and the new templates and printing options with frames is excellent. In my opinion you won't be disappointed. And no, I don't work for Apple!

Excellent upgrade
Some users have criticised the all new iMovie '08.... ignore them - the new version is ultra simple to use and you can genuinely edit a movie in minutes. And, as a bonus you get to keep iMovie '06 or download for free from Apple so you get the best of both worlds!

The changes to the rest of the iLife apps are worth the cost in themselves. iPhoto with skimming and events is just amazing. Mac gallery and YouTube uploading is a dream to use and the new templates and printing options with frames is excellent. In my opinion you won't be disappointed. And no, I don't work for Apple!