Inside Apple's iLife '08

Transitions can still be dragged between clips, and titles can be dragged onto or in between clips. The Project Library displays transitions much like older versions. Titles, however, are displayed above the actual video that they appear over. Again, skimming allows you to easily see how titles look over video at any point while editing.

As with previous versions, the iLife media browser is available to easily add photos or sounds to projects. Sounds can come from both iTunes and GarageBand as well as from audio files and, once imported, can be pinned to the beginning of clips or freely manipulated. Like titles, they display inline with video clips, except they look more like bubbles around the video they're associated with. Sounds can be trimmed by clicking a small clock icon in the upper-left corner of their icons.

Other features added or made easier to use include the ability to use an internal microphone or line-in device to record audio while watching or editing (useful for narration or recording alternate soundtracks directly in iMovie) and the ability to color-correct video using a palette similar to the one in iPhoto (a great option not often found in consumer video tools).

Inside Apple's iLife '08 iMovie iPhoto iWeb iDVD GarageBand

One final feature worth mentioning is support for YouTube: With a single menu selection, projects can automatically be encoded for and uploaded to the video-sharing service, making it easier than ever to share your videos with others.

For anyone who wants to edit digital video, iMovie '08 is a must-have upgrade. There are no consumer video-editing tools on the market that come close to its interface for either ease of editing or organizational features. Add to that the professional-level titles, transitions and results that it allows, and iMovie alone can justify the cost of upgrading to the new version of iLife.

iPhoto

IPhoto has long been a powerful product for organizing, performing minor image adjustments to and sharing digital photos in a variety of ways. IPhoto '08, a.k.a. iPhoto 7, provides new organizational tools, enhanced editing options, and more ways to print and share photos.

IPhoto's Events view lets one image represent a group of related photos. (Click for larger view.)

IPhoto '08 presents a significant advance in iPhoto's evolution. Its most noted new feature is the use of Events as a tool for organizing and locating photos. Events groups photos based on the day the photos were taken or imported (you can adjust the time frame that defines a single Event, though only within certain parameters) and use a single thumbnail image of your choice to represent the entire group in the library, similar to the Stack feature in Apple's Aperture. This provides a nice alternative to having to manually organize photos taken on specific occasions (such as birthdays, vacations, etc.) into albums.

When viewing photos by Events, you can skim across the thumbnail to see all photos in the group, much as you can skim video clips in iMovie. Merging Events is as easy as dragging them together, and splitting them is equally simple. The use of Events for browsing photos replaces the film-rolls view that appeared in previous versions of iPhoto.

While Events are great for new iPhoto users working solely with a digital camera, those with large existing libraries or users importing photos from folders on their hard drives may find that iPhoto doesn't always group images correctly. In my multiyear library (which has gone through multiple generations of iPhoto), for example, many older photos were placed in a single Event even though they came from distinctly different time frames (in one case, three years apart), and some events were placed incorrectly when sorted by date. This was most likely the result of the files having incorrect creation dates, which can happen when digital cameras are not set up properly or when files have been copied from other sources.

		iPhoto caveats The changes in iPhoto have also caused some problems and drawn some complaints, though not nearly so many as iMovie '08. Some users have experienced problems with iPhoto after upgrading an existing iPhoto library. Issues include problems accessing the iPhoto Preferences dialog (generally, the application hangs with a spinning beach ball) and hanging or crashing during slideshow viewing. In the majority of cases, these problems are solved by rebuilding the iPhoto library (which can be done by holding the Option and Command/Apple keys down when launching the program). Problems may persist if a user has moved his iPhoto library out of its original location. Discussions of this issue and others are going on right now in the Apple forums. A subtler change, but one with potentially more significant ramifications, is that the iPhoto library is now stored as a Package -- OS X's way of representing an entire subfolder containing multiple files with a single icon -- as though it were a single file. (Application files are often Packages.) This makes it harder for third-party software to access individual image files, though there is a work-around for it. It also means that, for now anyway, most backup software will back up the entire library, even if only one photo has been added or modified.