iLife ’09 iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD could be powerful.
The products in Apple iLife ’09 are useful in creating a powerful DVD video and image slideshow presentation. But let me explain a few issues, there are several Along the way I will note improvements that are small but would be a huge time saver.
The task Create a very good quality, professional slideshow that can be played in household DVD players.
The beginning I started the project by adding photos into their correct event groupings in iPhoto so iDVD can see them.
suggestion: I would love if iDVD noted images that already existed in iDVD. Adding photos and learning that they already exist is a huge pain.
After I loaded the images into iDVD I set them in order.
note: The timestamp of when the photo was taken or scanned is important! The photos are sorted by timestamp in iPhoto.
The project is then rendered to a blank DVD from iDVD with the professional looking fancy intro, nice. The transitions between images are basic and you cannot select transitions between photos, bad. As I view the DVD of images fading in and out on the TV screen I say this is not the quality I wish to accept. A generic black background? The entire presentation except for the intro screams cheap.
I thought about the project a little bit more. I can import videos and images into iDVD, right? What if I create a slideshow in something else and export it as a video. I poked my noise into iPhoto and checked out the template slideshows. There was a perfect theme, it is called “Scrapbook”. This would go prefect with this project. Now if only I could export to a video file format. It does!
iPhoto Export Menu
iPhoto Export Size
suggestion: This is were huge improvements could be made to the software. Adding music was tedious. For some reason I could not select the music tracks very easily. Why can’t I save the setting for each photo group? Each time I select a group of photos I have to select music tracks to follow.
note: Make sure you don’t have a image selected or this will be the default image used on start. After I hobbled along the export process I waited about an hour for about 40 images to export into a fantastic presentation. This process was completed three more times selecting different audio tracks per set of photos in the iPhoto gallery. If I missed any photos I needed to start the export process again. Not fun!
Adding the slideshow to iDVD Before I could add the recently exported videos from iPhoto to iDVD. I needed to imported them into iMovie. What a pain! After waiting about 5-15 minutes the individual video slideshows were imported into iMovie. Not really sure why I needed to put them into iDVD and wait again for everything to copy they are already in iMovie, it seems like a waste in disk resources.
suggestion: I wanted the ability to “Play All” imported videos in sequential order, a small feature but HUGE need. To get the video to play in order I needed to create another video in iMovie and export the grouped videos.
question: Why can’t I add multiple videos in iDVD under a single menu option? I can string photos together, but not videos?
Problems with iDVD themes With the videos loaded and images also available on the iDVD project it was time to perfect the menu interface. With any theme design most times you need to change text and add text. Let me say iDVD simply has a poor interface with grabbing the correct text used for many animation features used within iDVD.
solution: I found the solution needed. Apply a different theme to the project and and simply undo this action causing the themes to re-sync with the content listed.
note: Additional text added to the project was not synced with the theme and does not nicely fade in and out. There is no solution I know of for this.
Conclusion iLife 09′ software for making DVD is basic and has a huge lacking of features, and includes many quirky bugs. I should note that creating the basic image slideshow failed initially with a very general error.
iDVD - Very general error
I searched around and was not able to find a solution. only after restarting with a new project was I able to actually burn a DVD. Make sure you save after every edit and change, I had the program crash on me several times.
This entire project used with the following software versions: View FINAL PRODUCT
- Mac OS X – 10.6.2
- iPhoto – 8.1.1 (419)
- iMovie – 8.0.5 (820)
- iDVD – 7.0.4 (1116)
I have spent quite a bit of time working wih iDVD and agree that it has some quirks and to save often . . . it crashes . . . especially when pushed to keep u.
Did you see the completed product at the end of the post? I am happy how things finally turned out but the time spent was ridiculous to say the least!
I have a problem when I play a DVD which has been prepared using iDVD on my iMac (Snow Leopard). I can produce the DVD using pictures taken from my iPhoto library no problem and I then select music from my iTunes library and the finished product (the DVD disk) plays well on my, iMac and also on my PC BUT the problem arises when I try the play the DVD on my DVD player linked to my TV. Every time a transition between pictures takes place (which I have set at 3 seconds – rather than linked to the music) the music “blips” i.e. it hestitates – this continues at every transition and ruins the final effect while watching my recorded DVD on the TV.
Any suggestions?
Ken, this is frustrating! You said that the video plays find on your computers DVD player. Have you tried another DVD player? Some DVD players differ in the playback ability and quality.