iLife 09 Family Pack
iLife ‘09 makes it easier than ever to get the most out of the photos, movies, and music on your Mac. In iPhoto ?09, you can organize and find your photos in two new ways: Faces, based on who is in your photos, and Places, based on where they were taken. iMovie ‘09 lets you make the movie you want in the time you have. With new themes, you can give your movie a professional look in seconds. Or use the new Precision Editor to fine-tune your masterpiece. With Basic Lessons in GarageBand ‘09, you can learn to play piano and guitar. And you can compose and record your own songs with new guitar amps and stompbox effects. Illustrate your journey with photo books including new travel maps iMovie ‘09 Make movies with ease using advanced drag-and-drop editing Fine-tune your movies with the new Precision Editor Enhance your movie with dynamic themes and animated travel maps Smooth shaky clips with automatic video stabilization Add finishing touches with new titles, transitions, and effects Browse all your video in the full-screen Library Browser GarageBand ‘09 Learn to play piano and guitar at your own pace with Basic Lessons Learn to play a hit song from the artist who made it famous with Artist Lessons Re-create the sound of legendary guitar rigs with new amps and stompbox effects Jam using virtual instruments with Magic GarageBand Jam in full screen iWeb ‘09 Easily add dynamic content like RSS feeds and iSight videos using the iWeb Widget Browser Let your friends know when you update your site with Facebook notification Publish to virtually any hosting service using built-in FTP support Easily manage multiple websites and selectively publish one at a time notice iDVD ‘09 Get started quickly with Apple-designed themes featuring animated menus. Author customized DVDs with a range of options for customizing menu screens. Combine video and photos for stunning, high-quality slides
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Worth the Upgrade
iLife ‘09 adds great features that enhance photo organization in iPhoto. iMovie brings back many features it lost in iMovie ‘08. Garageband also adds some nice features in music lessons.
2 Stars iMovie is terrible–again. The rest of the programs are ho-hum
I bought this for one reason and one reason only: the desperate hope that iMovie had been fixed from the 2008 version to be more like the 2006 version. Didn’t happen. iMovie is now worse than ever. Editing audio files is probably the most frustrating thing I’ve tried in a while. The interface is just unintuitive, and I found myself looking for features that used to be there (fade out video effect in conjunction with audio fade out) thinking they’ve got got to be there somewhere, and then finding out that they simply don’t exist anymore. I honestly think they don’t want to make iMovie work the way it should to force people to buy the much more expensive Final Cut, even if you don’t need all of the features of a full video editing software. Working with HD video in iMovie is a joke; it lags, stutters, and crashes for no apparent reason.
iPhoto is ok, but still WAY behind programs like Adobe Lightroom II. The face recognition would be awesome if it worked well, but it doesn’t. It wanted to group my grandmother and my sister together (I guess there is a little family resemblance there). The GPS feature is awesome if you have a GPS enabled camera, but if you have a camera that nice you’re probably using Lightroom at a minimum, and even more likely a professional software suite like CS4.
Garage Band works like it should, but there aren’t any improvements that make it worth upgrading, especially with how poorly iMovie works.
Frankly, this is just another ho-hum release with more set backs than improvements. You don’t need to upgrade unless you just have to have GPS photo tracking or face recognition software. If you were hoping (like me) that iMovie would be fixed, think again. It’s terrible and makes iLife 09 simply unacceptable.
1 Star Still missing key organizing features.
iPhoto has a long ways to go before becoming a great organizer. Events seemed like a great idea when they were released in iPhoto 08 but the trouble with them is that you can’t put events inside of other events. The reason this is such a problem is that after you load so many thousands of photographs there becomes to many events and it becomes cumbersome to sludge through them all.
Their solution to this problem in 08 was the add the ability to merge events together. When this happens everything becomes one large event, it doesn’t maintain the groups of the events you merge together. I guess I can forgive them not totally thinking this feature though in iPhoto 08 but nearly a year and a half later they should have got this right by now. Adding events inside of events is a lot more important than even features like faces and places.
Doing a search is also limiting from the search box. You can’t set multiple search criteria at a time like in the Finder or Adobe Bridge. In other words I can’t say show me the files with these keywords that were taken during this time period and have this rating. I can only do one at a time. Yes I can do this with a smart folder but I would like to have option not to since I don’t always want to come back to the search later.
Posting to Facebook and Flickr only gives you access to some of the features on those sites. You can’t enter in all the information about the pictures from directly with in iPhoto (captions for photos, who can see the pictures, what should be the key photograph for an album etc.) Also iPhoto doesn’t pull the previous albums you created back in to iPhoto so you can only view some of your albums not all of them.
If you ever have to move your information to a new hard drive down the road all the work you did to put together slide shows won’t come across with the rest of the photos. I found this out the hard way as a spent a lot of time setting up manual Ken Burns effects so that they would pan from one particular area of a photograph to another. Now the only way a can access them is to boot back and forth between my old hard drive. It is a good thing I happen to have two drives in my machine or I would have to recreate them. I imagine this is what you would have to do if you had a laptop.
The recent area on the sidebar only shows the last event you look at. This is ok but I would like to see a history of the last several events I viewed. The last 12 months area doesn’t organize those photos by events so you just gets this massive number of photos which isn’t very convenient.
1 Star Huge disappointment!
iMovie - How is it possible that the iMovie “upgrades” have less features than the versions they replace? I mean, seriously, iMovie 08 was a complete disaster, now iMovie 09 is only a slight improvement over 08, still way shy of the capabilities in the 06 version. Apple did not reinstate plug-in support for 3rd party effects, so if you own hundreds of dollars worth of these I guess Apple is telling you they don’t want you to use their dumbed-down iMovie software any longer. Worse yet, they removed most of the cool built-in effects and give you about 12 or so really boring ones as a replacement? What are they thinking? Isn’t software supposed to improve with each iteration? Okay, enough on iMovie.
iPhoto - No good…period. The much-anticipated face recognition simply does not work. Does not matter how good your pics are, what angle the face is captured, etc, etc…it just does not work. That leaves us with “Places.” If you have a high-end digital camera with GPS to encode the location on your image files, this could be a nice feature. If you don’t, it’s again useless unless you want to manually tag each image with its location. If you have a large collection, this is near impossible.
iWeb - Ok, this one is an improvement. Added FTP support is the way it should have been from the get-go, but I will give Apple credit for finally adding this capability.
iDVD - No changes
Garage Band - Limited new built-in audio effects and music lessons. Basic lessons seem to be pretty good, but the highly advertised “learn-from-the-pros” lessons are an additional charge per lesson, available thru iTunes (another revenue stream for Apple via iTunes).
Overall, I think Apple’s software products are sliding, whether intentional (dumb-down iMovie so we can sell more Final Cut software) or unintentional. I regretted the ‘08 “upgrade,” and against my better judgement, decided to try the ‘09 “upgrade.” Fool me twice, shame on me…
1 Star No Excuse!
I’m a positive person, so here’s the good news first:
iPhoto has some great new features like face recognition.
GarageBand has a cool new interface.
iWeb has cool new widgets.
THE BAD
iMovie is still a travesty. Audio editing is impossible. Audio importing and placement is impossible. Clip editing is impossible. I realize I am overusing the word impossible in this review, but iMovie ‘09 is simply impossible. Totally non-intuitive and frustrating. My wrist was aching after only 15 minutes of trying to manipulate the editing controls. Also, it keeps crashing on my MacPro. In my book, there is no reason an Apple native app should crash so often on any Mac. Playback is stuttery and any editing I have tried to do just brings up the spinning beach ball of death. Avoid iMovie ‘09 like the plague and just go download ‘06 again. Whoever designed the new iMovie needs a spanking.
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