This is a major upgrade to iLife and will have a big impact on both classroom creativity and the management of digital projects. GarageBand's development over the past few years had focused very much on Podcasting, but 09 is very much about making music. iMovie storms back with a raft of new features, most notably more precise editing tools and a full arsenal of effects.
iPhoto 09
1. Faces - you have just downloaded a disk full of images and need to find pictures of a specific student. After labelling a couple of images, the face recognition tool will track each time the student's face appears in an image.
2. Places - useful for those school field trips where you need to locate where the image was taken. The tool will pinpoint on a map exactly where the image was taken. The software will work manually with images taken on non-GPS cameras.
3. Themed Slide Shows - now the departmental Open Evening slide shows will move up a gear. iPhoto has always been good for organising and presenting photos, but now Open Evenings can have a slick look, with new themes for displaying on screen or exporting to mobile devices and the VLE.
4. Enhanced photo editing is supported by new tools such as the Saturation Slider to bring out the colour without spoiling skin tones and a new Re-Touch Tool prevents blurring when enhancing skin tones close to the edge of the face.
5. Travel Maps - can be automatically created from GPS data in photos and included in the iPhoto Books. Note these books can be exported as Quicktime and PDF documents in the classroom.
iMovie 09
6. Advanced drag-and-drop options - enable instant drag-and-drop editing, including additional options such as cutaways, picture-in-picture, and green-screen effects. PIP offers two images on screen. This could be a presenter and an additional clip that could have any moving or still image content. Green-screen kits can cost thousands of pounds but young learners can now experiment within iMovie 09.
7. The Precision Editor - now enables fine tuning of edit points, moving of sound clips from one clip to another and fine tuning of the position of audio clips in the time line.
8. Themes and Maps - the new dynamic Themes are a quick fix for busy learners that don't have the time or the graphic design skills to present the intro and outro of their movies. It is a simple drag-and-drop process to create engaging content. Travel Maps include animated world maps and 4000 cities. These can be dropped into the time line to track a journey or set a scene.
9. Video Stabilization - with the rise of small disk based cameras (see the Flip V Kodak article), more handheld footage is being shot in the classroom. This function will especially help younger filmmakers smooth out the shakier sections of clips and highlight the sections that are too shaky. These can then be edited out of the project.
10. New Titles, Transitions and Effects - for many iMovie 08 users, the loss of key effects has been a problem. Now they are back with slow motion as well as the useful additions of green-screen and picture-in-picture, the latter being very useful for producing learning materials.
Garageband 09
11. Basic Lessons - offers tutorials on piano, loops, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, keyboards, voice and songwriting. The first lessons are pre-installed while others can be downloaded from the new Lessons Store.
12. Artist Lessons - including Sting, Fall out Boy and Norah Jones provide step- by-step guidance through the music and include the background story to the song.
13. New Guitar Features - include a Cover Flow style means of choosing an amplifier. The effects have been represented more clearly as "stomp boxes", which are also easily selected and tweaked.
14. Magic GarageBand Jam - allows students to jam along to other instruments and assign styles to the virtual players in the band. Custom mixes can be created and navigation through the jam is via the new Arrangement Track.
iWeb 09
15. New Templates - a fresh new set for quick and easy web page creation.
16. iSight Function - iWeb now offers the ability to take pictures directly, saving time.
17. Widget Browser - allows the addition of everything from Youtube clips to Google maps and countdown banners.
18. FTP Function - traditionally iWeb sites would be either uploaded to a Mobile Me account or saved to disk. Now FTP has been included, which should enable schools to upload content directly to their own school websites and other virtual spaces.
iDVD
19. Burn to disk - whilst uploading to Youtube at home or the VLE at school is easy, some of us still need images, sound and video on DVD disk. iDVD is still beautifully integrated into the iLife suite.
20. The cost - £58.00 and the iLife 09 School Site Licence is £169 plus £10 for a media disk (ex VAT)
For a complete list of the new features and video tutorials go to
http://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie/new-features
