When we heard about iLife ‘09 last month, Apple touted the Faces and Places features of the iPhone and image stabilization and precise editing in iMovie. How much does all of this pleasure cost? $79 or nothing if you get it with a new Mac. But is it worth the upgrade?
First, an important point for those unfamiliar with iLife: iLife is basically Apple’s answer to the bundled software you get with your computer. Whereas windows offers Paint, photo managers, and Movie Maker, iLife has always been, in my mind, the superior offering. On the whole I’m a big fan. It offers music, video, and photo editing and organizing software and comes free with Macs. Instead of reviewing the package as a new product, I am only highlighting the changes. If you don’t use a Mac and have never tried it, have a friend show you. It’s great.
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. While there are plenty of folks out there who use and need GPS information in their photos, those folks probably aren’t using iPhoto. It’s a nice to have but not a real draw.
Faces, on the other hand, is quite interesting. If there’s one thing iLife generally does, it gives you new ways of managing your media. iPhoto is primarily an organizational tool and Faces is a unique method for organizing lots of photos very quickly.
It took about an hour to scan my MacBook’s photo library of 2,195 and once it did it took another half hour to train the software to recognize the faces it couldn’t quite make out. Once it got going, however, it was able to find almost everyone automatically. When it can’t figure out who someone is it places it under the list of “identified” photos and asks you to accept or reject it by hand. The process is a bit time consuming but if you do it once you don’t have to do it again.
Even on my limited laptop library – I haven’t let this thing loose on my bigger desktop library – the service offers an interesting new method for image discovery. For example, we’re always trying to find pictures of the kids we might have missed to print out or email to the grandparents. By being able to search for Kasper or Milla, they’re basically right there. Faces isn’t a gimmick. It’s an organizational tool.
Facebook and Flickr uploading are essentially Apple’s way of saying “We know you don’t care about MobileMe. Sorry.” Enough about that.
On to iMovie. Image stabilization is the most important new improvement and if you asked Devin he’d tell you it’s horrible. However, if you have the DTs like me or you hand the camera over to your hyperactive cousin for a minute while you sneeze you’ll be glad you can slow down the shakes and quakes.
Sadly, the new version is still missing slow motion and audio editing is still sub par. They sadly dumbed the product down in 2008 and never really brought back any of the most important features.
Mea culpa. I found slow motion, PIP, and greenscreen features but you have to turn on “Advanced Features” in preferences. Pretty sneaky.
Garage Band, interestingly enough, has been improved by the dumbing down it received this release. For example, there is a Songwriting mode that gives you four tracks off the bat along with a basic drum track. Rather than offering a blank screen, Garage Band now understands that most music creation software is actually quite intimidating.
The new Lessons feature is cool as well. The product shows a video and then displays the chords played on a virtual guitar or piano. It even has a guitar tuner built in. I can only imagine how many budding musicians will be born thanks to this feature.
iDVD has a new travelogue feature. Big whoop.
In short, iLife 09 is a semi-solid upgrade but probably not worth $79 if you’re not overly excited about Faces or Lessons. Folks who buy new Macs from now on will be very pleased with the new features but for folks who are not impressed by some cosmetic changes and a few feature additions, you might be able to sit this one out.
Photo Gallery by Picturesurf
According the iMovie Tutorials, iMovie 09 has slow motion, fast motion and reverse settings within the video effect menu. Although I do not own iMovie 09 – I am pretty sure this effect is in iMovie 09, as Apple has removed iMovie 06 HD from their website.
The slow, fast and reverse motion was demoed at by Schiller at his MacWorld presentation. I definitely remember that feature because it was the one I missed the most with the older iMovie versions.
Can’t wait to try it out. Should be here this week. Does Face Tagging work when you move it to Facebook?
yes! It does! I just checked.
Awesome!
Does Face Tagging work when you move it to Flickr?
I hope it does that would be really awsome because I have more than 3ooo pictures to tag….
I, too, have been spending some time in iLife ‘09 after receiving it last week. I haven’t published my iMovie ‘09 review yet, but you can view my iPhoto ‘09 review on my blog. The only problem I had was with face tagging…it’s great–if it finds the face. I outlined my problem on my blog already, so I won’t retype it all here, but overall, I was pleased and very excited to have two new ways to organize my 4,200+ photos.
caseforcreativity.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/wp-admin#/photo.php?pid=5618150&id=771265067 example
Actually, it doesn’t work properly. It doesn’t link to your friends’ profiles, just puts a name in – meaning you have to re-tag anyone on your friends list.
Oh – and you can’t have two people with the same name. So if you’re tagging first names only (as iPhoto encourages) you’re not allowed to know two people called John.
Plus you can’t tag people whose faces are only partly visible or have their back’s to camera, as iPhoto will try to “learn” what they look like from the back of their head. Not that the recognition feature works 90% of the time anyway.
In short, it’s poorly thought out and very badly implemented.
(I don’t think this review was particularly useful as you don’t appear to have tried most of the new features in any depth)
Nice write up, I’ve just installed iLife ‘09 on my MacPro (took 7 mins to install) and then took 4 hours to background process 14k photos for faces and just about to start playing with that feature.
I just thought I’d correct one thing you said:
“Sadly, the new version is still missing slow motion”, it iMovie 09 does have slow motion, in fact it was demonstrated live in WWDC video when they announced iLife 09.
Scoopz
Huh. I looked and couldn’t find it. Maybe i missed something.
“Facebook and Flickr uploading are essentially Apple’s way of saying “We know you don’t care about MobileMe. Sorry.” Enough about that.”
– It means quite a lot – That your main repository of photographs is still kept local, and that you can get your tagging outsourced, and synced by Facebook colleagues, and share a copy of pictures of what you want on FB. It’s a quiet big play by Apple.
Well, it’s an admission of defeat.
PAINT?!?! You’re comparing iLife to MS Paint?!?!? Nothing compares to MS Paint, no other OS ships with an equivalent worthless painting application. A better comparison would be to compare iLife to Picasa or the Adobe Elements offerings.
OS X doesn’t ship with any competitor to paint, and the only worthwhile programs are Pixelmator and Photoshop, both pay programs. Paint is an excellent program.
Paintbrush – http://paintbrush.sourceforge.net/
If you’re going to compare something to Windows Paint, at least make sure it’s a Paint clone. XD
BTW, did Apple leave iDVD at version 7?
I seriously rofld at that comment man, the way you burst out. Really, a good one!
It’s true that apple doesn’t have a proper competitor to paint, but besides using paint for dumb nerd pranks from youtube, noone uses it. As for iMovie, I thought this review was nothing. The new iMovie is fcking awesome!! It’s way better than iMovie 08, which we expected, and compared to iMovie HD 6, it’s about the same. iMovie 6 is more for special effects and sound effects, but iMovie 09 really has some awesome new features that more than make up for iMovie 08. Combined, you can make the perfect homemade movies! And yes, the faces takes long to do with a lot of photos, but osmehow its fun to do that.
[redacted]
Being an ass isn’t funny.
Sad little boy
@robert — Mature.
What about iWeb?
Another improvement is that iMovie once again allows you to add chapter markers. The ‘08 version removed that (forcing me to revert to the previous version). Luckily it’s back and that alone almost makes me want to upgrade.
iMovie isn’t missing slow-motion; you can speed up and slow down clips, reverse the direction, add video effects like soft blurs and day-to-night, add PiP and green screen effects, add in a ‘travel map’, auto-assemble a movie w/themes… did you even open the apps? And Garageband has had Magic Garageband for a while, which used to start off the program (so it wasn’t a blank screen).
I hope you update this review when you actually use the software!
> you can speed up and slow down clips, reverse the direction,
That’s the only thing I was missing. I know about all of the effects stuff. I just didn’t see it.
Am I the only one having issues with TechCrunch’s new page format?
When I’m scrolling down the page, text inside the articles and the headers suddenly dissapear. I’m using IE6 (no, I’m not a, early adopter).
Or is this a new technology feature I am not aware of? Like the iMac’s INTUITIVE TYPING for the iMac Wheel.
TechCrunch has now implemented “Monochromatic Font Layout” so letters and background have the same color.
Impressive. Spit-dumb, but impressive.
for all the web-developers out there please upgrade from ie6, firefox is preferable but even ie7 or ie8 now, would be highly preferable
I concur. IE6 was released in 2001 and all of the browsers have gone through at least 1 if not 3 major releases since that time. You’ll start to see more and more anomalies with IE6 as time goes on and web developers no longer want to support it’s blatant rendering bugs. Don’t even get me started on the security holes that still remain in it . . .
yet ANOTHER reason why Mac outshines PC…
Mac is a PC…
This stuff’s free for PCs. Whether you buy a new computer or not.
John, you should update your post to reflect that slow-motion/fast-motion/reverse-motion is included in iMovie. It’s been shown at the keynote, it’s in the video demo of iMovie at apple.com, and also in writing on their website:
“Fast or slow motion adds comic relief or dramatic depth. Both are just a slide away in iMovie ’09. Drag a slider to adjust the speed of any clip. Or reverse it with a click. All your adjustments happen in real time.”
That seems like a fairly big omission/error.
Also, what’s up with the comment timestamps showing eastern times with a PST suffix…
ah. mea culpa as well. you updated the post already!
It’s widely accepted that free speech doesn’t give you the right to yell “fire” in a crowded theater when there’s no fire present. Why, then, do you provide a forum for hate speech like the threat earlier in this thread against Michael Arrington? Presumably the idiot behind this gets off on the attention he gets from making the threat publicly. So why indulge him? Having read Michael’s note about the threats against him, I don’t think anyone could fault you for disallowing such comments.
Morons will be morons. Too many people are jealous of success to ban them all. I have is IP address and will knock him out.
The geolocation awareness of iPhoto is the biggest thing for me. I’m planning a two week trip to the UK and I’m really looking forward to actually geo-tagging my pictures and building a travel book with maps.
BTW, I’m still in the training phase of face recognition, it thinks I am myself, my mother, and my dog’s back leg (I’m not joking, and I didn’t think I looked that bad).
Sheldon
Can you tell me smth more about video stabilization? I was considering buying a cheap (very cheap :D) steaDIYcam, but then I saw this feature in iMovie. But then I started to think how it would work…
And the only way I came up with is that it figures out how much you shake the camera and then crops the part that is always in the picture and stretches it to match the original resolution. Which means quite a loss in quality (especially that I use Nikon D90 for HD videos).
Is that right?
You’re right, Michael.
please don’t waste money on steadicam devices. practice your shooting. float the camera instead forcing yourself to try and hold it still and always keep it moving slightly. like walking with a teacup and saucer.. you won’t spill, you wont shake. and you won’t need the feature either.
You forgot all those people still toiling away with iLife ‘06 (or whateve the one before ‘08 was called.) I don’t have the date-based “event” abilities or other things in iLife ‘08. The trick with iLife and iWork is upgrading every other year, then the $79 is worth it.
Offering the option of Flickr and Facebook is hardly an admission of defeat. It’s strategically useful for Apple to do so, as MobileMe is subscription-based and thus limited in its usage. Flickr and Facebook are free. No defeat by Apple, just embracing the reality of the marketplace.
excuse me: but which os offers such stunning and user friendly stuff in one package? iLife, John, is incredible because it’s simple, focused on the basic needs and doing a perfect job. and, yes, of course, theres is always room for improvement. look forward to it and enjoy your upgrade, it’s worth it.
The addition of Facebook and Flickr uploading in iPhoto is simply an addition the iPhoto’s feature set.
The average Crunchgear user/writer may not care about MobileMe, but many of Apple’s iLife users likely find it the most direct way to share pictures and movies online. I know many families with a large, and growing, MobileMe gallery.
There is a very large segment of Mac users who don’t use Facebook (or any social media).
“In short, iLife 09 is a semi-solid upgrade but probably not worth $79 if you’re not overly excited about Faces or Lessons.”
LOL… totally disagree!
I’m asking because it seems like the slide show image quality, when burned to DVD from iPhoto 08, is less than it used to be in 06. But it used to be horrible if you imported it into iMovie 06 first and then into iDVD.
And since iMovie 08 seems to be devoid of any of the good movie and audio editing features that 06 had, I’m wondering what other folks are using now if they want to have a good set of editing tools without going to professional software.
Has anyone seen improvements to these issues in 09?
Ahh, man somehow the first part of my post got cut off…
My question was about whether anyone alse had seen a decrease in quality of movie output from iMovie 08 vs 06 or slide show output from iPhoto, when burned to DVD.
There are HUGE improvements in iMovie ‘09. It is IMHO a complete replacement now for iMovie ‘06 HD. ‘08 was only a partial replacement. You can assemble great slide shows in iMovie ‘09 and send to iDVD with great quality (be sure that iDVD’s quality is set to professional for the best encoding, takes more time but worth it if you ask me). You can also do a slide show in iPhoto and export it as a movie and use it in iMovie ‘09 or send it straight to iDVD as well.
Since you guys seem to know a lot about iPhoto, maybe you can make this easy for me. I have a lot of photo’s, more than can fit on my MacBook Pro. How do you store all these photo’s (external drive) but still use when I’m on the road?
Tim
hey tim,
you can do this by going into your user id folder/pictures and drag out the iphoto library file in there onto an external drive. that will then take all of your photos over to that drive. when you want to access that library off your external, you option-click on iphoto and it asks you to choose which library you’d like to open. just navigate to your external and open it up.
I have 5 different libraries on my external drive…after one gets to big to be on my powerbook I just move it off.
hope this helps,
steve
Thanks Steve
tim
To be fair, the Windows competition to iLife is probably more accurately “Windows Live Essentials”, especially with the realignment in Windows 7. The only product it doesn’t really have an analog for is GarageBand.
The applets like Paint and Wordpad really just started as demos of windows features I think, and never were intended to be real products.
It would be really cool if you did a product by product comparison of the two suites.
Am I missing something or is there no way to create a smart album based on Faces? You’d think that the faces you identify would be added as tags, but they’re not, so there’s no way for me to filter so that I’m looking at just those shots that include both my kids.
Never mind, I just double-checked and it turns out you CAN filter on faces when creating a smart album…for some reason Apple decided to use the term “Name” instead of “Face” in the filter.
The blackberry phones with GPS can do geotagging (its an option in the camera settings) so I plan to take a “guide shot” of each location and then use a nice camera for the “real” shots, then geolocate using the blackberry shot and integrate with Google Maps on my web site.
I feel like Steve Martin as Theodoric, the 11th century judge, “It’ll never work.”
Nice review and thanks! – Bob
iMovie ‘09 on my machine is missing the slow-down / speed-up feature. And I went into prefs and checked advanced tools. It won’t let me speed up or slow down clips! This is bogus…
ou can slow down or speed up video clips in your project, and you can make them play backward.
To slow down, speed up, or reverse a clip:
Double-click a video clip in your project.
Drag the Speed slider to the left to make the clip play slower, or to the right to make it play faster.
Fields to the right of the Speed slider show the percentage of normal speed and the clip duration. The farther you drag the slider, the more extreme the speed change.
To set the exact percentage of speed or clip duration, type it in the fields to the right of the Speed slider.
To make the clip play backward, select Reverse.
In the Project Browser, when you move the pointer over a video clip that has had its speed or direction changed, an icon in the upper-left corner of the clip indicates the following:
Rabbit facing to the right: The clip is sped up.
Turtle facing to the right: The clip is slowed down.
Rabbit facing to the left: The clip is reversed, or both sped up and reversed.
Turtle facing to the left: The clip is reversed and slowed down.
You don’t need a camera with a built-in gps to use places. You can buy a GPS data logger (around $60) and take it with you at your trips. The photos you take will be matched to the logged gps data using the time and written to EXIF data of the images. You can use some free software or the software that comes with the logger. The places feature of the iPhoto will recognize the gps data recorded in the photo (at least it seemed so in the demo at Macworld).
Does anyone know if the places data get written into the exif of the file or is stored in the iphoto directory. IE: can you take your file out of iphot and still see the GPS coordinates?
yes, it is written to the exif of the file, even the location information is entered inside iphoto. Just check the location information box while exporting the photo.
I have the macbook pro, but in imovie i need slow motion and fast motion, how to do?
Good review, but you come off a bit lazy and really didn’t seem to do your homework on the product. Or you totally missed the keynote. Again, must have been the JimmyJane vibrator keeping you sidetracked.
Is there a way to pull my identified faces over to iMovie. It does not seem to be an option. Seems that this would be a great way to create movies for kids b-days, etc.
I have heard that iMovie ‘09 has a larger bank of transitions. Can anybody confirm this?
I’m a bit disappointed with the editing capacity in IPhoto 09. It will default back to the unedited version of the photo after I have spent time ‘fixing’ it and I move to the next photo. Cropping and resizing both seem very unstable. When I combine these types of edits with any image enhancement, i.e. increased exposure, it can’t handle it. I would expect a more robust graphic feature from MAC.
so HOW do you get the box with the ’speed’ line up? i have tried clicking everything to find where slow motion / reverse / speed up are but STILL can’t find them! what do you click to get that box in the photo up?? thank you :D xx
I can;t find the speed up/slow down/reverse slider. Grrr. Lil help? I believe I downloaded all the mac updates, installed them and rebooted 2 days ago.
I’m having the same issue with speed-up, slow-down. I’ve watched all the tutorials, googled the problem for an hour, and found myself in this forum.
If I double-click on the clip it simply plays. I can triple, quadruple, or better-click and all I get is the same clip playing.
I’ve been into preferences, added everything and tried every way I can and still can’t speed up or slow down clips, or even get the option with the slider.
iLife is an amazing product. I am a huge fan of the Faces and Places portion. For people thinking about buying a new mac, the addition of iLife for free is a great feature.