Apple has recently released (as of August 7), a new version of their digital lifestyle suite, iLife. The new versions, called iLife ’08, includes updated versions of iPhoto, iWeb, GarageBand, iDVD and a completely revamped version of iMovie.
I decided to take a look at the new features introduced with these new applications, most of which I’ve used extensively in the past. I wasn’t able to try out these programs yet, but wanted to create an overview document for each application, showing exactly what Apple feels are the new features deserving to be highlighted. In this overview, I’ll take a look at what’s new with Apple’s DVD-authoring program:
iDVD
My sister got married a year ago this past July, and for her one-year anniversary, I wanted to give her and my new brother-in-law a DVD, with as many of the professional photos, as well as pictures our friends and family had taken, as I could, as a series of slideshows.
I had done a project like this in the past, and used iMovie, but it was a bit unwieldy at the time, so I decided to use iDVD. I hadn’t used iDVD much, but found that it was incredibly easy, and a few of the things that had in past been difficult, were now simply a matter of telling iDVD what to do, and watching as – after a few seconds – the job that had taken hours in iMovie was done, like that!
So I was quite excited to see what new features Apple had added to with the latest version of iDVD. I can’t say that I’m completely blown away, but the additions are, to be sure, very very good.
As Apple typically does, each new version of iDVD has more themes. These themes include menus as well as introductory material, and are fully animated. Typically menus include fun events, such as birthdays, anniversaries, parties, sporting events and vacations, as well as more serious events like weddings.
One other feature Apple is touting is better encoding performance. This is really key, in my book. For too long, Apple has allowed iDVD to get by with only promising an hour of high-quality video on a DVD project. A store-purchased movie, by way of comparison, will often hold between two and a half and three hours of high quality video, even on a single-layer disc. I have not seen mentioned anywhere how much more content can now fill a disc, but Apple promises an improvement in this area.
Another area where speed improvements are promised is in the responsiveness of the application itself. When I was working on the wedding slideshow DVD, it was occasionally frustrating to want to change something around, either the theme of the menu, or simply switching back and forth between edit and preview mode. With the new version of iDVD, this will hopefully be a thing of the past.
One last new feature in iDVD ’08 is the ability to use higher-quality photos in your photo slideshows. Since a regular resolution DVD typically has an image size of 720×480 pixels, a slideshow created in iDVD has been limited to that same size. This has been unfortunate, for even though the resulting product still looks fine, with today’s digital cameras capable of taking photos at six or seven times that resolution, it has seemed a shame to lose the detail of the picture. The new iDVD allows for higher resolution, which means those same slideshows, when viewed on a big screen TV, will look even sharper than before.
As I said, it seems that iDVD was the program that kind of got the short stick in this update. I’m sure the improvements are wonderful, and when I try the new iDVD, I fully expect to be impressed, but on first glance, it appears that the main improvements are all under the hood. I suppose every program doesn’t need a complete face lift like iMovie received, though. And besides, it’s the final product that matters, and that final product was already good, so with the promised advances, I can’t see any reason to be disappointed!
