iMovie & iDVD Visual QuickStart Guide

KeynotePro Creates iDVD Themes

iDVD 5 offers 73 built-in themes, but is that enough? No! KeynotePro is now offering their first iDVD theme: MetroBlue for iDVD. MetroBlue ties into similar themes the company has made for Keynote and Pages, and costs $20.

Take Control of GarageBand ebooks updated for v2.0

Jeff Tolbert's two ebooks about GarageBand have been updated for GarageBand 2.0. I think we're the first ones to release GB2 books, which is exciting! Check them out:

Take Control of Making Music with GarageBand 2.0

Take Control of Recording with GarageBand 2.0

Want to record music with GarageBand 2.0? This ebook explains how to use GarageBand to create musical compositions with vocals, drums, guitars, MIDI keyboards, and even the kitchen sink! Seattle musician Jeff Tolbert shares his GarageBand know-how and years of recording experience to help you get the most out of your existing gear or purchase new equipment that fits your budget and style. You'll find real-world recording studio techniques, learn how to use a microphone effectively, and discover how to apply effects like a pro. Clear steps and plenty of practical advice help you plan a recording session, record multiple tracks at once, and fix mistakes easily. Two example songs demonstrate many of the techniques discussed. Bonus! Linked-in audio lets you listen to examples while you read about them. More info and a special offer!

HDV Encoding Times

Mike Curtis at HD for Indies has been soliciting feedback on how long it takes iMovie HD or Final Cut Express HD to render HDV video back to the Sony HDR-FX1 HD camera. Unlike standard-def DV, it's not a real-time process; the Mac has to encode its AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) footage, which is what the apps use for editing, to MPEG-2 (HDV).

A quick poll of readers got this back:

Mac: dual 2.0 GHz G5
encoding time ratio: 6:1 (it takes 6 minutes to encode to HDV MPEG-2)

Mac: dual 1.25 GHz G4
encoding time ratio: 10:1 (10 minutes to encode one minute of AIC to HDV MPEG-2)

Mac: Mini 1.42 GHz
encoding time ratio: 15:1 (15 minutes to encode one minute of HD resolution AIC back to MPEG-2 for HDV layback)

A dual 2.5 GHz G5 might nudge that a little closer to 5:1, but it's clear that 1080i60 HDV footage takes a long time to cook. Important to remember when you're on deadline.

My iMovie HD and iDVD 5 Reviews

My Macworld reviews of iMovie HD and iDVD 5 are now available on the Web.

HD For Indies

I'm a new reader to HD for Indies, a great resource on HD shooting and editing. My brain is suffering overload from all the information here: HD For Indies.

Hollywood Calculator 1.0.1

I've wanted something like this for a long time: Hollywood Calculator 1.0.1, a simple Mac OS X application that easily calculates timecode. Need to quickly figure out the total length of your movie if you add a 3:43:19 (that's 3 minutes, 43 seconds, 19 frames) to it? Plug it into the calculator; it works with four frame-per-second rates (30, 29.97, 25, 24). That's not all, though: you can also choose a footage type (such as DV NTSC or DVCPROHD 1080i) and see how many hours/minutes of footage will fit onto your drives.

NYT Reviews Sony HDR-FX1

Ahh, to be the New York Times. I tried unsuccessfully to get a review unit of Sony's new HDR-FX1 HD camcorder to write an upcoming iMovie HD review, but didn't get anywhere. Not surprisingly, David Pogue at the Times has reviewed it: State of the Art: Home Video Made to Watch on HDTV. Although I could have bought one and then returned it, I'd no doubt get hit by a restocking fee; for a $3500 camcorder, that's a hefty price to pay!

Testing Slick Stabilizer

My wife and I went eagle-watching over the weekend, where we spotted 26 eagles over the course of about eight hours (this was near Concrete, Marblemount, and Rockport, WA). I don't have a great zoom on my camera, so I improvised by placing a pair of binoculars in front of the lens. Although the camcorder was locked down using a tripod, I had to hold the binoculars by hand, making it extremely difficult to center the bird in view. So, we ended up with some really shaky footage of some eagles.

Today I thought I'd try throwing it at image stabilization software, in this case Slick Stabilizer, part of GeeThree's Slick 8 package. I was surprised at the results, given that (a) the footage is really shaky, (b) the lighting isn't good due to the added lens, and (c) there's a lot of detail - branches, etc. - in the footage that could potentially confuse the software. You can view the results here: Eagle Stabilize Test.

iDVD 5 erases RW media

This is probably one of those no-brainers, but until now I wasn't certain whether one needed to manually erase a DVD-RW or DVD+RW rewritable disc that already contains content. In iDVD 4, you could write to rewritable media by inserting a DVD-R after you click iDVD's Burn button, then sneakily ejecting it and inserting a DVD-RW disc. But, you had to use the Finder or an application like Toast to erase the disc first.

iDVD 5, however, recognizes when a content-containing disc is in the SuperDrive and asks if you'd like it to be erased first. After clicking Yes, the normal burn process begins; after all the data has been encoded, iDVD performs the actual erasing, and then burns the new data to the disc.

Like I said, it makes sense, but I hadn't seen it mentioned anywhere yet.

Slick Fixes for iMovie HD

As I noted shortly after Macworld Expo, people who had some of GeeThree's Slick plug-ins for iMovie installed ran into problems in iMovie HD (Apple didn't make the software available to third-party developers, so the folks at GeeThree and other plug-in vendors have been working hard to get caught up). Now, GeeThree has released the Slick update for iMovie HD (iLife '05), a 3.4 MB download that fixes problems with Slick volumes 3 through 8 introduced in iMovie HD; Slick 1 and 2 were unaffected.