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Edit Review: Apple iLife '06

May 1, 2006 12:00 PM, Reviewer: Franklin McMahon

Apple’s suite is powerful for professionals and consumers alike.

Apple's goal of bringing professional features to everyday consumers may have you wondering, can you still use iLife ‘06 if you are a pro? Absolutely. In fact, this new version of the suite, which includes iPhoto for image organization and editing, iMovie HD for high-def cinema productions, iDVD for burning, GarageBand for recording and song creation, as well as iWeb for website creation, will put a lot of power in your hands for not a lot of coin.

iPhoto 6 brings a lot of the power of Aperture to the desktop with a similar setup for manipulating and organizing images. Apple recently released Aperture 1.1 with new features as well as a lower price point, but it's still worth investigating iPhoto for less intensive workflows. The program can archive and organize up to a quarter million images at once. One cool feature you might overlook — your image collections can be made into gorgeous hardcover books (and cards and calendars) that can be ordered from within the program. The program has a lot of built-in editing tools for images as well as a suite of filters.

Like Aperture, iPhoto 6 moves the interface out of the way so you can view your stills at fullscreen with pop-up requestors overlaid with a tinted, translucent panel — similar to the Mac OS X Dashboard. The best part of the program is how you can organize and sort according to different shoots, dates, years, or however else you want.

Another big change I love involves importing images. In previous versions of the program, every time I imported pictures, it copied them into a separate iPhoto library folder. This wasn't efficient because I now had two copies of everything for no real reason aside from convenience. Now with this version, you can navigate into the advanced preferences and toggle off this feature.

The program also supports RAW files and will even automatically save edited RAW files as 16-bit TIFFs. You can also export a group of photos directly to iWeb and create on-the-fly a photo page or blog (although, unfortunately, you are limited to 99 photos with this export).

iMovie HD is no Final Cut Pro, but if you do the math, this program does pretty amazing HD editing for less than $20. It always grabbed as much 1080i footage as I threw at it, and HDV cameras I hooked it up with were always immediately recognized and ready to roll. External footage was another matter. Any footage I captured elsewhere, such as DV or MPEG, took a very long time to import, so the best option was to capture HD natively with the program itself. The software comes with professional templates and animated themes if you want to whip up something quick, and it does a lot of effects such as color correction, levels, and filters in realtime, thanks to the power of the Mac OS X Core Video engine. You can also make audio adjustments such as EQ, noise reduction, and pitch change.

The big interface change with iMovie HD 6 is that you can now have multiple instances of the program open at once, and drag HD footage, images, and soundtracks from one project to the other very easily.

You can bring your footage right over to iDVD 6, which also has nice professional templates and makes creating one-off DVDs very drag-and-drop. In fact, it has a feature called Magic iDVD, where you simply select a template, choose the movies and photos you want, and then, yes, like magic, iDVD creates a complete DVD with menus, chapters, slideshows, and footage.

The map view of iDVD 6 has been redesigned to make it easier to keep track of your projects. You can easily drag around movies to relink them, as well as drag menus to different locations in your DVD structure. The program smartly flags errors or dead ends in your DVD project map and alerts you. iMovie HD supports the SuperDrive, of course, but also works with third-party drives and can burn many formats including dual-layer and DVD+R/+RW and -R/-RW.

New to iLife '06 is iWeb, which allows you to create a website quickly and easily and upload it to your server or to your .Mac account. And while uploading to a .Mac account is one effortless click away, Apple provided no provisions for FTP uploading from within the program. You basically have to manually drag your website folder to your server, a bad omission that hobbles an otherwise great program.

iWeb works almost completely by templates, and while they do look fantastic, there is not much wiggle room to alter them. However, everything from blogs to picture slideshows to showing QuickTime movies on your site is just a few clicks. It has to be the easiest web program ever invented. A media browser built into the iWeb program allows access to all your iLife content: pictures from iPhoto, audio from GarageBand, and movies from iMovie. Blogging is especially efficient; the program sets up a summary page as well as subpages of posts. It even creates an archive as the blog grows and manages the RSS feed so people can subscribe to it. While graphics, especially text, look sharp and professional, what goes on behind the scenes is a little more problematic. iWeb often converts text to bitmaps to keep styles consistent, which unfortunately causes the pages to be larger than they need to be and bypasses chances for web spiders such as Google to index the major headings and titles of your website. Also, while images can be dropped in easily, there needs to be more control over efficient compression. iWeb easily makes things look fantastic, but it does not always make things web-savvy or efficient, so there is a tradeoff.

GarageBand 3 might be where you spend the most time. It's the most polished and professional program within the suite. GarageBand 3 has a lot of features that media artists demand in a multitrack recording suite, but don't forget that this is one of the best loop programs available. Creating a song is drag-and-drop. The program will keep everything in time and sounding good, and if you need to score some music for a production, GarageBand makes it fairly effortless. In fact, this new version has a new video track, so you can finally bring clips into the program and score them with timing cues.

The biggest additions to the program are the podcasting features. While creating enhanced podcasts (audio + images) for the iPod has been tough in the past, now you merely drag stills into your podcast artwork track, arrange all your audio tracks, then export. Easy. The program now ships with hundreds of sound effects that can be used for podcasts. You can even record iChat conversations with GarageBand. Each guest goes to a different audio track for roundtable discussion podcasts.

Among the most amazing features are the speech-enhancement tools. You can change your voice from meek to powerful with easy-to-use compression, simulate different microphones, optimize your sound to adapt to your specific microphone, and even change your voice from male to female. Finally, a ducking effect automatically reduces your music or backing track audio when you begin to speak. It can get jumpy and overcompensate quickly, but the feature does work. I would like to see more options to modify ducking in future editions, however.

Is iLife worth the cash? For $99, it's really a no-brainer. My only disappointment was primarily iWeb. It holds so much promise, yet the more I used it, the less I was impressed. It handles web development oddly for the sake of convenience, and it's a bit unfair to force those users who don't have an Apple .Mac account to fend for themselves using external FTP programs. This limitation is especially odd because this suite is geared toward non-savvy consumers for the most part. These problems hinder a product that otherwise produces stunning sites very quickly and effortlessly. I anticipate the next version will ramp up the features and flexibility. iMovie is cool, almost as a basic newsroom cutter, and the built-in realtime effects are neat, but you'll probably use Final Cut anyway. However, iDVD is perfect for getting a client a disc ASAP. I look forward to iDVD supporting HD-DVD and Blu-ray in the future; that will be powerful.

The real stars of the show are iPhoto and GarageBand. iPhoto is fantastic for keeping track of all your JPEG and RAW photos. GarageBand is not only a great loop-scoring program, but now it's one of the best ways to record podcasts, especially enhanced ones. It works great for cutting together music productions. And with the huge included loop library, it's fantastic for creating songs from scratch. For all these great programs, at this price, it's a steal. Grab a copy — you may get more professional use out of it than you'd anticipate.

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bottomline

Company: Apple
Cupertino, Calif.; (408) 996-1010
www.apple.com

Product: iLife ‘06

Assets: Low price, easy to use. iPhoto and GarageBand are professional-level programs.

Caveats: No provisions for FTP uploading from within iWeb, inefficient web development.

Demographic: Consumers and professionals alike.

PRICE: $99

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© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.