This isn’t the iMovie you’re used to - but it makes it amazingly painless to create movies quickly.

iMOVIE '08 - MOVIES MADE EASIER

Apple sure loves to reinvent things. It reinvented the graphical user interface with the Lisa and then the Mac. It reinvented digital music with the iPod and the iTunes Store. It reinvented the cell phone with the iPhone. And now, with iMovie ’08, Apple has reinvented digital video editing. We’re not kidding: This new iMovie is not merely an upgrade to Apple’s entry-level video editor. It’s a whole new animal that approaches editing from a very different - and very fresh - direction.

And that shift, as you might have already heard, has created plenty of controversy. Not only does iMovie ’08 feel absolutely alien to iMovie die-hards, but it also lacks some arguably key features that the previous versions of the software had acquired over the years. Noting a chorus of complaints about this new version of iMovie on Apple’s online discussion boards and other websites, we launched it with considerable skepticism, wondering how Apple could have gone so wrong.

But here’s the thing: Once we used the new iMovie, we were quickly struck by how incredibly easy it is to edit home videos. It’s really, really easy - noticeably easier and more intuitive than editing in iMovie HD 6. This newfound ease of use made the method behind Apple’s madness abundantly clear.

Capturing and Editing. At the heart of iMovie ’08 is a streamlined approach to previewing all the video footage on your Mac, and then turning it into your final cut. But it all starts with video capture. You can now hook up just about any MiniDV, HDV, MiniDVD, or AVCHD camcorder and capture all onboard footage or just select bits. Either way, iMovie ’08 recognizes the footage from a day’s shoot as a distinct event. For instance, last month’s surprise birthday party footage is one event, and last Saturday’s skateboarding footage constitutes another. Naturally, you can name each event as you see fit.

You can view all the events you’ve ever captured in iMovie ’08’s Event Library, and clicking an event shows all of its footage in the Event Viewer. It certainly is nice to have all of your captured footage available anytime, regardless of what project you’re working on. The footage is laid out in a filmstrip view, with a new thumbnail image representing every couple of seconds, so you can get a rough idea of your video’s contents at a glance. And it gets better. To preview your footage, simply drag your mouse across the filmstrip and iMovie ’08 automatically previews it. No more clicking on individual clips to open them, then dragging a playhead or pressing a Play button to see the footage in each clip.

When you spot a clip you’d like to edit in iMovie ’08, you click the filmstrip where the good footage begins and drag your mouse to where the footage ends; the app highlights that segment. This, too, is much easier than dragging the old iMovie’s In and Out points around. Now just drag the highlighted area to iMovie ’08’s Project window (the equivalent of the old iMovie’s Timeline), and iMovie will lay down your edit - again, this is much simpler than iMovie’s former copy-and-paste method. You just keep doing this, dragging new segments of video to the beginning, end, or anywhere in the middle of your movie.

Trimming clips that are already part of your project is a cinch. Again, just click and drag your mouse across the area of the clip you want to trim, and then choose the Trim command to remove any video outside your selection. You can also enter Trim mode to add or remove frames from the start and end points of clips already in a movie.

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1. Music for this movie is bounded by the yellow-outlined box. 2. These are your sound effects; you can layer multiple effects together. 3. These little icons represent transitions between frames.

Audio and Effects. On the audio front, iMovie ’08 takes a unique new approach, thanks to the elimination of tried-and-true audio tracks. To add background music, you select a file from the Media Browser and drag it to an empty spot in the Project window. iMovie ’08 responds by placing a colored box that represents your music behind your edited footage. You can trim the music to play any segment you want, and move it around in time. Adding sound effects works a bit differently. Since a sound effect typically plays in sync with video, you simply drag it to a frame in your video edit, and it attaches there, represented by a green bar that extends the length of the effect.

This is an undoubtedly unusual approach to audio editing, but it’s nonetheless easy and intuitive. The big limitation in iMovie ’08’s new approach is the extent to which you can control the volume on your audio. You can set each clip’s individual volume (and automatically normalize the clips, so no one clip overpowers the others), but you can’t use iMovie HD 6’s old “rubber-banding” feature to manually change a clip’s volume over time.

You can also add transitions and title effects simply by dragging and dropping them anywhere over your edited footage. Gone are the beautiful motion-graphics themes introduced in iMovie HD 6, but there are still plenty of slick text effects for title cards or over-video captions. iMovie ’08 lets you do iPhoto-like image correction, so you can adjust a clip’s levels, exposure, saturation, and other related settings, but it ditched all the other effects filters found in iMovie HD 6 (no soft blurs, no aged film, no fog, no lens flare, and so on). On the bright side, you can rotate video clips, crop them, and still apply the ol’ Ken Burns effect to still photos.

When you’re finished with your masterpiece, iMovie ’08 makes it much easier to export the video and share it with others. Under the Share menu, you’ll find options for exporting to iTunes; to the iLife Media Browser, which makes it available in other iLife applications such as iDVD; to .Mac’s new Web Gallery (if you’ve paid for a .Mac account); and even directly to YouTube. iMovie ’08 lets you export in four different sizes that are preset for playback on a video iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, your computer, or online, and you can actually batch-export all sizes with a single click.

The bottom line. There’s no denying that iMovie ’08 lacks some of the firepower of its predecessors, but many of those missing features only served experienced movie editors who should’ve stepped up to an intermediate editor like Apple’s Final Cut Express ($299) anyway. For regular folks who want to edit fun, casual movies with as little effort as possible, iMovie ’08’s new drag-and-drop interface is a huge leap forward. Since iMovie is, after all, an entry-level video-editing app, Apple made the right decision in getting back to basics.

COMPANY: Apple

CONTACT: www.apple.com

PRICE: $79 as part of iLife ’08; free with a new Mac

REQUIREMENTS: Power Mac G5 (dual 2.0GHz or faster), iMac G5 (1.9GHz or faster), or any Intel Mac; Mac OS 10.4.9 or later; 512MB RAM (1GB for HD editing); 3GB free disk space

New interface makes basic video editing a breeze. Directly imports video in the AVCHD and MPEG-2 (MiniDVD) formats. Easier to export movies online and to other devices.

Requires experienced users to master a new interface. Missing features from earlier versions, such as audio “rubber banding” (keyframes), chapter marker placement, themes, and many text and effects filters. Doesn’t work with G4 Macs.

WHAT'S NEW IN iDVD?

For starters, iDVD ’08 has noticeably peppier performance, so you can switch from one theme to another more quickly and play smoother real-time previews. Better yet, iDVD can now use the same two-pass, VBR (variable bit rate) encoding engine that Apple’s high-end DVD Studio Pro uses. The result? Your movies look sharper, although encoding times will increase, and you’re more likely to see a difference in shots with a lot of movement, rather than static shots.

iDVD ’08 also comes with 10 beautiful new themes (4:3 and widescreen versions), and either includes or lets you quickly download every theme that’s ever shipped with past versions of the app. A new Drop Zone Editor also lets you see your project as you edit your drop zones, so it’s easier to try out different design ideas.

But DVD authoring has taken a step back in one notable way. iDVD ’08 doesn’t let you add chapter markers to your movies, and iMovie ’08 no longer lets you embed them either. The only way to add chapters is to import a movie into GarageBand or iMovie HD 6, add markers there, and then import back to iDVD ’08.

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iPHOTO '08 - LOTS TO SMILE ABOUT

iPhoto will never be a Photoshop killer, but that’s never been its intention - it’s always been about providing fun yet effective tools for “we the people” to prettify and share our digital images. But in the case of iPhoto ’08, the new organizational features may have even the pros turning to it for its simplicity.

Smarter Photo Management. iPhoto ’08’s new Events feature makes managing photos easier than ever (good-bye and good riddance to Rolls!). Rather than having you stare at a sea of thumbnails, iPhoto ’08 automatically groups photos by date or time into events, reducing clutter and making finding photos snappier. When we imported our 850-photo intercontinental odyssey into iPhoto 6 a couple months ago, we dreaded the thought of organizing the mess into albums. When we installed iPhoto ’08, the app took care of the dirty work for us. All we had to do was rename the events with country names and we were done - awesome.

But you don’t have to stick with iPhoto’s organizing scheme; you can channel your inner Martha Stewart (assuming you have one) and create a new event from within an event to organize your collection further, split an event into multiple separate events, or merge events. You can also quickly flip through the photos from event photos by mousing across the event’s thumbnail, or double-click it to view the collection. If you have a lot of events, however, prepare to scroll; even at the smallest setting, event thumbnails are still kinda big.

We like the Magnifier tool, which lets you quickly enlarge images by double-clicking, and allows you to discard out-of-focus photos in a flash. Speaking of bad photos, the new Hide Photo command does exactly that. While it’s not a practical method for hiding, say, your porn collection, it does let you conceal photos that you can’t bring yourself to trash, but don’t always want to see. This comes in handy for your photos of ex-significant others.

Search has been consolidated into a streamlined tool, letting you search for photos by title, date, keyword, or rating all in one place. Keywords have also been improved, allowing you to tag and find photos faster. Other new features include the Web Gallery, which lets you publish your photos to .Mac (that’ll cost you $99 per year). And new desktop-printing themes, photo books, and calendars provide extra design choices for the print-minded.

iPhoto ’08’s Highlights slider let us quickly resurrect the overexposed church and balance it with the foreground.

Better Editing Tools. iPhoto’s editing tools also get a few enhancements. The Crop tool now sports a grid to help you better recompose images. The Retouch tool provides better visual feedback of the area you’re affecting, and you can resize the tool, too.

The Adjust palette gets three new sliders: Highlights, which darkens light areas to bring out detail; Shadows, which lightens dark areas to reveal detail; and a midtone slider in Levels, which adjusts midtones. All work well for most photos. To correct color, the new Eyedropper tool works really well - just click on what should be a white or gray item in your photo and kiss the colorcast good-bye. New Sharpness and Reduce Noise sliders work the magic of their namesakes, and worked beautifully for most of our images.

iPhoto ’08 does have a few minor blemishes. Scrolling is somewhat sluggish when zoomed way in on images in the Edit window, and we noticed some hesitation scrolling through photos in Photos view. Also, some date ranges in our events displayed incorrectly; while iPhoto properly created five events for our five-day Paris trip (which we merged into one event), it displayed a date range that spanned four years.

The Bottom Line. For anyone who owns a Mac and a digital camera, iPhoto ’08 is still the no-brainer choice for image management. Its new features make it a fantastic all-in-one package that covers more bases than ever - and turns it into a viable contender among image editors.

COMPANY: Apple

CONTACT: www.apple.com

PRICE: $79 as part of iLife ’08; free with a new Mac

REQUIREMENTS: G4, G5, or Intel Mac; Mac OS 10.4.9 or later; 512MB RAM (1GB recommended); 3GB free disk space

Events take the pain out of photo organization. Quick magnify makes weeding out photos more efficient. Eyedropper tool corrects colorcasts in a click.

Some lag when zoomed in on images. Smallest event thumbnails are too big. A few minor bugs.

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GARAGEBAND '08 - LIVE IN MORE PERFECT HARMONY

Apple has built its legacy on creating products that help us do things better, faster, and easier. GarageBand has certainly made the world of music creation and recording accessible to all. With GarageBand ’08, Apple takes another leap forward, adding advanced features that are typically only found in pro recording apps, while maintaining GarageBand’s characteristic ease of use. It’s a delicate balancing act - and it does come with a few hiccups - but overall, the updated version truly rocks.

Get the Best Sound. For those familiar with recording apps, GarageBand ’08 includes some new features to help you get the best recordings and mixes possible. For starters, the app now supports 24-bit audio quality, though you’ll need a compatible 24-bit-capable audio interface to attain the high resolution. We love multi-take recording, which allows you to record a section of your song over and over, capturing multiple takes of your performance until you get it right. It works without a hitch, and it’s truly a lifesaver when you’re a little slow on the Record button.

Our favorite new feature is automation curves, which provide more precise mixing control. Like volume and pan curves, you can now vary instrument and effects parameters, plus tempo and pitch on the Master track, over time. For example, to change a synth’s sound, you could alter the parameters of its sound generator progressively between a verse and chorus, or set a delay to occur only at the end of a note. However, the execution can get a bit clunky if you’ve got a lot going on, since you can only view one curve at a time per track.

The arrangement features make building and rearranging songs simple; just define arrangement regions (such as an intro, verse, and chorus) and drag and drop them to rearrange sections - all tracks within that region will follow. You can also duplicate an arrangement region by Option-dragging to quickly build a song. The Visual EQ provides an easy way to boost and cut frequencies, though without a bandwidth control, you can’t notch out narrow bands of undesirable frequencies without taking down some of the desirable ones with it.

Live chord display shows the name of any chord you play in a Software Instrument track. Play three notes of a chord and it’s pretty darn accurate; play two notes and it isn’t always as smart. New mastering effects simplify the process of making your mix sound radio-ready, and some presets made our tracks sizzle. There’s also a new instrument tuner, which works well, and a Print command that lets you print the musical notation of a Software Instrument track. And if you need help in the vocal department, Apple’s new Voices Jam Pack (an extra $99) adds soloists, backup singers, and choirs to your projects.

Then there’s Magic GarageBand, a new feature intended for GarageBand beginners that allows you to select a style of music from nine options, audition a backing band, and have a musical accompaniment ready to support whatever it is that you play or do. We found that Magic GarageBand offers more form than function - which is a nice way to say it got boring pretty quickly. But for kids or those new to recording, it’s an amusing ball of yarn to play with for a little while.

Despite GarageBand ’08’s advancements, there are some setbacks. The app requires more computing iron than previous versions: Sessions that played fine in GarageBand 3 (the version in iLife ’06) choked a bit in GarageBand ’08, and changing certain instruments and loops caused longer wait times. Also, files saved in GarageBand ’08 won’t work in earlier versions, so forget musical collaboration unless everyone in your workgroup upgrades.

The Bottom Line. If you’ve got a powerful enough Mac, GarageBand ’08 is a worthy step up from its predecessor. The app contains some potent new features that truly let you take control of your music, at a price that simply can’t be beat.

COMPANY: Apple

CONTACT: www.apple.com

PRICE: $79 as part of iLife ’08; free with a new Mac

REQUIREMENTS: G4, G5, or Intel Mac; Mac OS 10.4.9 or later; 512MB RAM (1GB recommended); 3GB free disk space

24-bit audio support. Multi-take recording helps capture that perfect performance. Automation provides better mixing control.

Eats more processor power than its predecessor. Some performance hiccups. No backward compatibility.

Read the conclusion to our coverage of iLife and iWork '08 here.