JUST CURIOUS--Anyone getting iLife 04 next week?

[terryj]

Curious what people's thoughts of buying the new iLife 04,
is it worth it for the new iDVD 4 and iMovie4, or is
everyone happy with their choices of authoring software
they have now?

[AntnyMD]

I've pre-ordered. I don't have an iDVD capable burner, but the other products in the suite are worth the cost. iLife is like crack: they give you the apps free at first, and get you hooked ... then they make you pay.

Education Store pricing on my pre-order was 50% off.

[galactica]

50% serious!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
man i need to use my educational aspect more often!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[tgpo]

$25 with my educational discount. I think I'll get it.

[pusa]

I'm gonna get one. Mainly, I'm going after iDVD4, iPhoto4 and GarageBand.

Whoop whoop!!!

[AntnyMD]

50% serious!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
man i need to use my educational aspect more often!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I always try to use it. Back when the iDVD upgrade was available as a standalone product, I tried to order it and was perplexed why it was back-ordered. The price was $19.99 edu. The next day they announced the first iLife and since I had an existing backorder for iDVD, Apple sent me the entire first iLife for $19.99 with free overnight shipping by FedEx.

[willrob]

For those not getting educational discounts, today is the official release date. The Apple Stores, CompUSA etc should have it. Amazon.com sold the previous version for $35 including shipping. but they have no listing yet for the O4 version.

william

[MikieV]

I will probably get iLife, just to get iDVD - as an inexpensive way to get the "new" compression. I was looking at paying for DVD SP, which is much-o over-kill-o for what I want to do - but I wanted a shot at the "High Quality 2-pass VBR" setting in Compressor.

My video camera is only fair output-quality, why degrade it any further with compression?

Seiously - if Compressor, or a significant part of it, is part of the deal - it will be a great mony-saver for me. And I can save that money for a better camcorder! Can you say "Win, Win"

Current camcorder is 2000-vintage Canon VR-30. A great first miniDV camcorder, but just about anything recent will be a step-up.

Mike

[pusa]

I just ordered a copy of iLife '04 from CompUSA and I tell ya, I'm happy that I bought it. 50 bucks was worth it. I'm playing GarageBand like crazy.

[willrob]

I picked one up yesterday at CompUSA [ they also have the Jam Pack for Garageband] and launched all the apps (in the order suggested by Apple — be sure to read the Read Me file), and while it took forever for iPhoto to import my 5G photo library, once it was loaded the speed was much improved over iPhoto 2. I did'nt play with iMovie (I use FCP), but I did launch iDVD to check out the new themes and other improvements.

If you checked out the themes on the Apple web site, as I did, you might at first be puzzled why some of them appear differently in the release. The same material is still there, but part of the footage (the Drive In and the Movie Theatre Marque, for example) is in the "pre-roll." This is a new feature of iDVD. When you insert a DVD you can have either video play automatically, or a slideshow of stills, before the menu appears. To see these clips fully, you have to enter the Map mode and click on the pre-roll segment. It will seem to end abruptly, but it's really sequeing smoothly into the menu portion.

I haven't burned anything yet to test the purported 2 hours of material...I don't have two hours of footage to burn. But since I have FCP4 and Compressor, could I achieve better results having the fottage compressed before iDVD? Or will iDVD try to do it all over again?

There's a good overview and some tips on the new features in a free pdf by David Pogue on the oreilly.com web site. One important tip vis a vis iDVD, even if you only have an hour or less of footage, you will geet better results by selecting "Best Quality" over "Best Performance". Then iDVD will use the full disk space for the footage, resulting in better image quality (at least compared to an hour DVD burned with previous versions).

william

[MikieV]

... There's a good overview and some tips on the new features in a free pdf by David Pogue on the oreilly.com web site. ...william

Thanks, I'll go take a look.

Mike

[ronin]

willrob,

I can't seem to locate the Pogue article you are talking about at Oreilly.com. Could you please post a link.

Thanks

ronin

[icoty]

Ronin,

I'm not willrob, but you can find the free PDF file on the oreilly.com homepage under News & Articles. It's called "David Pogue's iLife '04 Mini Manual", use Safari's find feature and you should be able to locate it. It's a good read, about 50 something pages. Good luck!

[ronin]

icoty....

Thanks a bundle!!!...I have been staring at that page and clicking link after link....it was right in front of me the whole time! Thanks again...and it is a good read...Off tomorrow to get iLife4

thanks again

ronin

[jrsdsl]

Here's a link if you can't find it on the Oreilly site

http://www.macdevcenter.com/mac/excerpt/iLife04_MiniManual.pdf

[zorankarapancev]

Customers who purchase a qualifying new MacIntosh computer on or after January 6, 2004 that does not have iLife ‘04 included can upgrade to iLife ’04 for US$19.95.
The program ends on March 26, 2004. Your order must be postmarked or faxed by March 17, 2004, so order your upgrade now.

[zorankarapancev]

For more information go here: http://www.apple.com/ilife/uptodate/

[AntnyMD]

Note to those who might want to purchase iLife 04 without having a Mac with a DVD drive: GarageBand is only on the DVD thats inside the box. It's not on the CD install disc.

[galactica]

likewise, if you do get the cd version and you DO have a dvd drive, it wont work!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[willrob]

My copy came with both the Cd and the DVD. I tried the CD first, thinking the applicaations were spread ovr two disks. The installer noticed that i have a DVD drive and said I needed to use the DVD. The DVD then instaled all the iApps.

william

[AntnyMD]

This from the Pissed at Apple File:
Apparently iDVD could be installed on Macs without SuperDrives since sometime in mid-2003 ... Who knew and didn't share?

I learned from MacFixIt you can just tell the Installer app to put iDVD on .. but I distinctly remember the original iLife DVD wouldn't even stay in your drive if it detected the drive was not a SuperDrive!

Anyhow, here is the Apple Knowledge Base article on how to install iDVD from iLife 04 on your Mac with a Combo drive. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93290

After installation, when you run iDVD4 you get a nifty pop-up saying Your Macintosh does not have a supported SuperDrive. Please note that while you will be able to work with iDVD projects, you will not be able to burn a DVD disc.

This is fine since reportedly one of the new capabilities in Toast 6 is the ability to burn iDVD projects.

[galactica]

This is fine since reportedly one of the new capabilities in Toast 6 is the ability to burn iDVD projects.

Have you or anyone gotten this ability to work yet!?

[AntnyMD]

No. I tried to give it a go while getting ready for work this morning but had all of ten minutes to try to figure it out. For me with my Combo drive, the Burn option is greyed out in iDVD4. I could open the iDVD4 project in DVD Studio Pro 2 and it started to encode the QuickTime clip, but it was taking too long. Also DVDSP2 did something funky to the drop zone in the menu from iDVD4.

[tgpo]

I think I may purchase it this weekend.. I dunno

[willrob]

iDVD4 also has the ability to be installed on a Mac without any DVD drive. in that instance the project is saved as a disc image which can be moved to a Mac with a DVD drive. Or in the case above, burned via Toast or Disc Burner on the (unsupported) external DVD drive.

I havn't burned anything with iDVD4 yet, so I have no way to know if all this works smoothly. Reports on MacFixit and MacIntouch seem to indicate much longer multiplexing times than iDVD3, but then folks are approaching the 2 hour zone, and still wanting the best looking image— and that will take the six or seven hours users are reporting.

william

[AntnyMD]

How can you get it to save the project as a disc image? I'm looking but its not jumping out at me.

[willrob]

I think I miss spoke. You can save the project and move it to another machine via the "archive" menu item. For some reason I thought the archive would be a disk-image. But it may just be a form of compression.

william

[AntnyMD]

Yeah, I tried archive and that wasnt the solution, but I had hope!

I was able to open the archive file (and previously, the project file) in DVDSP2 and get it encoded. DVDSP2 stripped away the theme, so thats why the drop zone looked funky/dead in DVDSP2. In iDVD4, it looked gorgeous...

There must be some file in that .app package that says GRAY OUT THE BURN OPTION or something ... I'll go poking around in there tonight.