“Apple is touting what it calls the biggest changes to iLife in more than five years. iPhoto gets some nice ease-of-use adjustments; iMovie changes radically from its predecessor; and the most obvious addition to GarageBand is a virtual stage for composing original songs. iDVD offers new themes and customizations as well as professional-level encoding. Overall, this package for editing photos, movies, and music seems to be a great deal, still $79, plus it’s free with the purchase of a new Mac,” Elsa Wenzel reports for CNET Reviews.
“Movie ’08 is a far cry from the ’06 version. It’s built to simplify on-the-fly video editing, but Apple has removed many controls that added depth to the older version. But you can keep both programs on one machine when you install iLife ’08, and you can download iMovie ’06 version 6.0.4 for free,” Wenzel reports.
“We’re not crazy about iMovie’s new split personality, with features removed from the new version in the name of simplification,” Wenzel reports.
“We wish the altered interface could have retained more features from iMovie ’06, instead of forcing longtime users either to suffer with less functionality or use the old software,” Wenzel reports.
“Newcomers to iLife will find uncluttered interfaces and a well-rounded set of features for managing pictures and making movies, songs, and podcasts,” Wenzel reports. “For those upgrading to iLife ’08 from a prior version, the alterations to iPhoto are the most practical, especially for managing massive picture libraries. Although GarageBand gets more controls, iMovie eliminates many in its upgrade, and users may consider it dumbed down. And Apple seems to be pushing serious video hobbyists away from iMovie and toward Final Cut Express. We wish there were a happy medium.”
Full review covering more of iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, GarageBand, and iWebhere.
MacDailyNews Take: As we’ve been answering in emails all day, we consider iMovie ’08 to be well-suited to the target market (entry-level consumers) and believe that it will help new users to edit videos more quickly and easily. If Apple had not offered iMovie ’06 HD for free to current users, we would have had an entirely different take on iMovie ’08. We understand the reaction to the new iMovie from long-time iMovie users, but we also believe iMovie ’08 has great potential. Current iMovie users lose nothing (they can use iMovie ’06 HD if they wish) and new users gain much in terms of simplicity and speed. We believe iMovie ’08 offers a better, easier way for novices to edit video; making video editing more accessible to more people, which we believe was the original intent of iMovie. iMovie in recent years had become a sort of “Final Cut Express Lite,” which did not address the novice video editor as appropriately as iMovie ’08. Bottom line for iMovie ’08: In general, old users will be mad; new users will be glad.
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