Product Description

ILIFE 2008 RETAIL - INT

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #887 in Software
• Brand: Apple
• Model: MB015Z/A
• Released on: 2007-08-08
• Platforms: Mac OS X, Macintosh
• Format: DVD-ROM
• Dimensions: 19.68" h x 19.68" w x 19.68" l, 3.00 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...

Almost wonderful
I love the upgrades made to Garageband and iPhoto but the new iMovie is somewhat lacking.

Some of the things it does are good - it organises your movies very well, and some of the features (like colour grading) are useful. However it lacks some real basics, like a decent titling system, control over audio and support for the old iMovie effects.

It's made for someone playing around with home-movies; not someone starting out in video editing.

Great iPhoto upgrade, but iMovie failed
I have a G4 PowerPC running at 1.67 GHz with 1 GB memory and using Leopard. I upgraded to iLife '08 because it appeared to be the sensible thing to do, and the cost was reasonable. The upgrade to iPhoto is certainly very useful, although I have not exploited all the new features yet. I have not really used iDVD and iWeb yet, but I will get round to it in the near future, and I don't use GarageBand. My biggest negative is with iMovie. iLife '08 does not allow the upgrade on my "old" machine. Reading the reviews, this could be a good thing since many of the comments about the latest iMovie are negative. I am still disappointed since it does not say on the box that iMovie won't load for older machines. So, basically 4 stars go for the iPhoto upgrade, minus a star for the failed iMovie upgrade. Equals 3-stars overall. The upgrade may still be worth it just for iPhoto.