Apple iLife '11 Video

Apple iLife '11 Video Transcript

-Hi! I'm Josh Lowensohn with cnet.com and I'm gonna walk you through some of the new features bundle into iLife, Apple's latest update to its consumer media editing and sharing suite. iLife '11 comes free with every new Mac. But if you've got an older version, it's a $50 upgrade. This year's edition comes nearly 2 years after the release of iLife '09. In the time since, Apple has updated just 3 of the 5 applications that make up the suite, iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand leaving iDVD and iWeb untouched since the last version. To put iLife on your machine, you'll need a Mac with an Intel processor, 1 gigabyte of RAM, and Mac OS 10.6.3 or higher. You'll also need about 5 gigabytes of storage free on your hard drive. For us, the upgrade took just a little under 20 minutes and required no restart. One of the biggest changes in this suite can be found in iMovie as Apple has added the option to edit the audio in your clips. Hitting a new button that appears just underneath your project timeline, you can see a wave form that clips audio and make edits to how loud or quiet it is. But it's not just about making audio more even, Apple has also added some fun special effects tools that lets you tweak the audio. These ranges from the rather mundane of making people sound like they're on a telephone or shortwave radio, to give them a robot or alien voice. You can also adjust the pitch up or down which lends itself well to some video hijinks. Along with audio editing, a new feature in iMovie '11 is movie trailers, which lets you create short movie trailers using footage of your friends. Each trailer is set up as a template and you're given a list of characters that you can drag in, drop footage into. To make this process easier, iMovie will scan your footage for people to figure out how many people are in a shot and how close they are to the camera. We found trailer making to be easy to use, quite a bit of fun and highly customizable. It's also a very fast process if you've already planned out your shots ahead of time. Besides the additions to iMovie, Apple's photo editing and library management tool, iPhoto has been given some nice tweaks. First and foremost, you can now do everything in full screen mode which is especially handy on notebook computers where you're trying to squeeze every bit of usefulness out of a smaller display. Apple has also made sharing a better experience with the options to send an e-mail of your photos from within iPhoto. Previously, you'd have to fire up Apple's mail program. Apple has also enhanced how iPhoto talks to Facebook so you can post photos not just the Facebook albums but to your wall and profile picture too. For analog sharing, iPhoto's books are still there and joining them in this year's edition are cards. You can now print flat and folded cards along with letterpress cards. All of which can be customized with your own photos and text than purchased from within the app. Apple has given the book and card making experience a complete overhaul since last year's version with a new carousel view which lets you preview what each style looks like before you dig in to customizing it. Notably missing from this process are calendars. Something Apple says is coming in a feature software update. In the meantime, you're limited to making books and cards. Rounding up the list, the last application to get an update is GarageBand, Apple's music training and editing software. This year's version improves on the lessons program with a new system that will actually listen while you play a song with the practice track and highlight all of your mistakes. You can then go back to those parts and replay and retry until you'd get it right. Along the way, GarageBand keeps track of your progress and can give you a virtual report card of how you've improved since you first started. Besides lessons, Apple has added 2 new ways to adjust instrumental tracks you've recorded. The first is called Flex Time which lets you tweak the timing of a recorded note. If something is in the wrong place or slightly off, you can drag it in GarageBand's timeline. This is incredibly easy to use and can make a track with just a few mistakes into something that sounds like you nailed it on the first take. But if a lot of things are wrong, Apple has included something called Groove Matching which lets you pick a single recorded track as the one you want the other track to sync up to. This is a one click affair and will make Flex Time adjustments to all the rest of the tracks automatically. These are just the few of the new features you will find in iLife '11. It maybe a little bit late compared to previous versions of the software suite. But at $20 less than the last version and with some significant improvements to 3 of its core apps, we think it's a pretty good deal. For more, be sure to check out our full review. I'm Josh Lowensohn and this has been a first look at Apple's iLife '11.