Product Reviews

The latest version of iLife 09 doesn't have any new applications, and two of its existing components, iDVD and iWeb have been virtually untouched. But the improvements to iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand mean that there's plenty to get excited about.

iPhoto

iPhoto's new features centre around an expansion of the Events feature in the iLife 08 edition and new ways to share your images. Joining Events in iPhoto's Library are Faces and Places.

Faces is iPhoto's version of the face-recognition technology built into recent digital cameras. However, instead of just recognising when there are one or more faces present in an image, iPhoto attempts to put names to them, too. You'll need to give it a helping hand, of course, but once you've set it on its way, it does a decent job of labelling faces in your library.

Using it is simplicity itself. Click on a photo with a face in it and click on the Name button in iPhoto's toolbar. The application then attempts to pick out the face or faces in the image and frames them. If it doesn't find one or more faces, you can add them manually by clicking a button and drawing a frame around the face.

With faces identified in the first image, you click on the label beneath the frame and type in a name. iPhoto then trawls through its database of photos and attempts to identify pictures that have the same person's face in them. It then displays the images it finds and asks you to confirm whether it has identified the faces correctly.

The automatic identification works very well for photos where faces are shot from the front in good light. And it makes a decent fist of those shots where faces are shot from the side or above or below, or in partial shadow. It does struggle with faces obscured by hats or sunglasses, but as you identify faces manually, you teach iPhoto more about each face and it then uses that information to better identify the face in the future. Faces is a genuinely useful way of organising images and we found it fun and easy to use.

Places organises images by geographic location. If you have a digital camera with GPS, iPhoto uses the metadata from it to determine location. Otherwise, you click on the 'i' in the bottom right of an image, select New Place from the location drop-down menus and iPhoto then employs Google Maps to allow you to search for the location by name or postcode.

Once it's found it, it adds a pushpin and you assign the location to the image. Clicking on Places in the library displays a map with pushpins at the locations where you've taken photos. And clicking on the place name displays images shot at that location. Places is less intuitive than Faces, but still very useful.

The other key new features to iPhoto are the ability to upload images to Facebook and Flickr, and to keep the images in iPhoto and those in your Flickr and Facebook accounts in sync. All in all, the 09 version of iPhoto is a very solid, if unspectacular upgrade.

iMovie

iMovie proved to be the most contentious change in iLife 08, in the main because of its radical change of interface and reduced capabilities. However, this version reveals that the previous incarnation wasn't so much misguided as premature.

Colour adjustments and audio effects have been consolidated into a single Inspector palette along with clip options and a range of video filters that includes sepia tones and vignettes. They're called upon simply by double-clicking a clip, rather than via toolbar buttons, which feels intuitive and lets you implement your ideas easily. Moreover, you can apply the same effects to multiple clips, which takes the tedium out of the process.

Editing is also improved with the addition of contextual menus. For example, if you drag footage from an event and drop it into an existing clip, a menu appears with options to replace the entire clip or just its audio, or you can insert at the exact frame without having to manually split the clip.

Existing features are better organised. No longer do you have to visit the Edit menu to find the split clip feature as it's now immediately at your fingertips. And features that were previously discarded from the application in iMovie 08 aren't just restored but also conveniently located in the contextual menu, so you can create chapter markers and freeze frames without a fuss.

Video stabilisation technology has been inherited from Apple's professional video tools and will be invaluable for anyone who finds their movies suffering from camera shake. By tracking parts of the image from

ADVERTISEMENT

frame to frame, iMovie calculates scaling and rotation that steadies footage, with a slider to control the extent to which it's applied - too much and it'll look unnatural, and you must also take into account time for the analysis, which is of the order of several times the length of the footage even on a high-spec MacBook.

What really impressed us, though, is the much-improved control of audio tracks. Select Detach Audio in the contextual menu and you can slide and adjust audio so that it even overlaps adjacent clips. With enough source material and creative use of fade in and out you can create your own crossfade effects.

iMovie's timeline made it difficult to achieve fine control of transitions, but opening the Precision Editor reveals a pane containing the two clips as filmstrips, which can be skimmed with far greater accuracy. You can even adjust titles and audio that lie around the transition.

A surprising letdown comes from the iLife Media Browser, which fails to expose the new organisational features of your iPhoto library. So while you would reasonably expect to browse photos using Faces and Places, which would make it quick to make a movie featuring specific family and friends, you'll have to browse manually, by album or keywords or, as a last resort, you can drag images direct from iPhoto's window.

You can decorate your movies with dynamic themes and embellish your travelogues with animated travel maps, which are particularly impressive. Although iMovie's database doesn't contain all cities, a close-by location is sufficient, as movements within the UK aren't zoomed so close that you can tell the difference. Whether you enter two locations in the same country or on different continents, iMovie automatically zooms the map to an appropriate level.

iMovie will still find its detractors, particularly among those who prefer traditional timelines, but with intuitive contextual editing and an expanded feature set, iMovie 09 will begin to find new fans.

GarageBand

We haven't been as excited about a new version of GarageBand since it was launched, and this version introduces the most appealing new feature since then. Learn to Play teaches you how to play piano and guitar through nine lessons each, covering theory and practical learning, although only two are included on the install disc and the others, weighing in at just under 5GB, can be downloaded free of charge from the Lesson Store.

GarageBand's newfound educational role isn't limited to new musicians. Experienced players can learn from a growing roster of famous artists including Norah Jones and Ben Folds. Artist lessons cost £3.95 each and offer plenty in exchange, with video of artists explaining their song's structure and history. Of course, you can play along to the full song, even slowing it to suit your skill level while you master its intricacies. You can even get rid of the artist's vocals, alter the volume or mute parts of the arrangement, and display notation for either or both hands, tailoring the material to your own learning ability.

Magic GarageBand still offers nine genres as starting points to create a basic backing track, but you can choose from a much wider range of instruments, including saxophones, violins and different vocal effects. Instruments' volumes can be mixed during an audition, but you'll revisit this once you've laid down a complete track, as panning is absent.

A tuning feature makes life easier for guitar players, as it displays the note played and a measure of its sharpness or flatness. Once in key, you can lay down ideas directly into Magic GarageBand by selecting a section of the song structure, such as a verse or chorus, and hitting record.

GarageBand's revised opening dialog box offers more helpful starting points. Learn to Play, the Lesson Store, Magic GarageBand and iPhone Ringtones are accessed from here, but the most pleasing change is the new projects that include piano- and guitar-led songs, movie scoring and loop-based tracks. They open with a selection of preconfigured tracks and relevant panels already open, which is less frustrating as you take tentative steps beyond Learn to Play.

Electric guitar projects show the amp and effects panel, where you can rig up one of 37 virtual amps and up to five of 10 stompboxes. The graphical presentation is more engaging than the dropdown lists used for software instruments, but even they have been revamped with a cleaner look that makes better used of available screen space.

This is GarageBand's strongest release to date, but it's the educational features that are most enticing, literally going back to basics in the hope that more people will be able to make use of this admirable iLife application.

Updates to iWeb are more modest and to iDVD, non-existent. New Widgets in iWeb enable you to easily add video and photos from an iSight camera, video from YouTube, as well as RSS feeds and a countdown timer. You can now also publish from iWeb using FTP.

Overall, then, despite the apparent stagnation of iWeb and iDVD, the updates to GarageBand, iMovie and iPhoto make iLife 09 a very worthwhile upgrade indeed.