Apple’s new iLife ‘09 suite of applications was released this week and some reviews are beginning to trickle in around the web. For the most part, the new software works as promised, just don’t expect any magic.
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber runs through some of the iMovie stabilization techniques and how they can be applied. “What I’ve found is that iMovie won’t apply any stabilization at all to a clip that contains any portions which are too shaky to stabilize,” Gruber explains. “But if you break that clip up into two separate clips — editing out the blurry “whipping around” frames — iMovie will then stabilize the separate clips.”
The below video is a great example of iMovie’s stabilization capabilities from Beau Colburn. As explained, the end result is a much more heavy feeling video. “The end result seems to add a certain “weight” to the video, in that it has the feel of being shot with a heavier camera that wouldn’t shake so much in your hand, versus the superlight Mino. It’s not going to eliminate all shakes, but it can certainly minimize them in the right situations.”
Maclife’s Roberto Baldwin has managed to get iPhoto’s new face recognition to work on animals, cats specifically. “Once a base face is established, iPhoto begins finding the person, or animal, on its own. At that point, you just need to confirm the animals face in the Faces’ “Confirm Name” menu.” However, not all impressions of the new facial recognition feature are that great. Some readers in the MacRumors forums are not that impressed with how it performs. “I’ve just tagged myself, and the the suggestion of who it thought were me ranged from everyone from my gran, my two year old niece, and an alarming number of other women (I’m a guy),” a reader explains.
Crunchgear went in depth with iLife ‘09, and overall the reactions are pretty positive. Aside from some minor discrepancies, or rather negligence in attention from Apple, all seems well received. “The most prominent additions are Faces and Places. Places uses embedded GPS data to place your photos on a map and you can use this information to make map-based video travelogues. Although this is great for iPhone shots – the iPhone embeds GPS coordinates in every photo it takes – it’s not so great for owners of non-GPS enabled cameras.”
In regards to iMovie, Crunchgear explains that the new stabilization features mentioned above are great, however the lack of slow motion control and audio editing is still disappointing.
Early impressions about the new Garageband have also been positive for the most part. The software has been made even simpler, but not at the expense of usability. iDVD has only one new feature, a travelogue, and Apple doesn’t even mention iDVD on the physical box of the iLife ‘09 bundle.
Official guided tours can be found on Apple’s website, iMovie is here, and iPhoto is here.
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2 Comments to “Apple’s iLife ‘09: Reviews From Around the Web”
Crunchgear is incorrect about varible speed effect in iMovie 09. iMovie 09 can slowdown and speed up video. However, the clip needs to be converted which does not take long.
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Thanx for the clarification David.
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