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iMovie and iDVD: the apps that could be excellent, but aren't

I recently needed to make a small movie and I decided to give my first real try on iMovie and iDVD.

My idea was simple: merge a bunch of videos that I had of my friends all together, put some nice effects and background music and burn it to a nice semi-professional DVD. But accomplishing this was not so simple. And it was not because of the lack of features of the applications or because of my newbie experience on a Mac. The applications have the potential (but not the ability) to be great, but the frequent crashes and system hangs can really make it unbearable to work with them.

But let me tell you about my experience so you can draw your own conclusions.

The iMovie experience

On a first note, I used the iMovie HD from iLife'06 because iMovie'08 was crashing too many times with just some simple editing features. If you feel the same about iMovie'08, don't worry. You can download and install the previous version and keep both versions running on your Mac.

So first of all, I needed to collect all the videos and get them into iMovie so that I could make all the editing in one place. This task was really painless, whether it meant importing videos or recording them with the iSight.

Editing the movies (to get only the parts that I wanted) was really simple too, but sometimes the application would crash and exit without any warning and would put the unsaved files on the Trash. And sometimes I wasn't able to restore the videos back from the Trash, which meant that I had to import and edit them again.

When all the editing was finished, adding some background music was very simple and no problems occurred. Managing the volume between the parts where people were talking during the movies was really simple and the final result was amazing.

Adding some subtitles or text effects was also very easy and problem-free. Adding special effects was not that easy, however. At this point, I decided to add some effects to the movies to make them look a little bit more professional.

I wanted to add a "white point adjust" effect to give the movies a "warmer" look but this revealed to be an impossible task since iMovie crashed everytime I tried this.

Since I was going to use iDVD for making the DVD, I decided to use the iMovie "Chapters" tab to add some chapters' anchors to help people navigate the movies. This presented no problems.

The iDVD experience

With my movies ready, I used the "export to iDVD" feature of iMovie (Share->iDVD) to start a new iDVD project. The transfer was amazing and iDVD even created a menu view with all the chapters I created before on iMovie, so no work was needed to make these. I also added some extra menus and sections to show other movies (such as bloopers).

I then chose a nice theme (from one of those that come with iDVD) and used the "drop zones" to choose the appropriate videos that I wanted to show on the DVD title. The "drop zones" are areas on the DVD title where you can place videos or photos that will appear when you put the DVD on your DVD player. The effect is amazing and I couldn't wait to show these to my friends. However, actually creating a DVD with these effects was a different problem.

After trying countless times to create the DVD with no success (the computer would hang after an hour and a half of rendering menus) I decided to look over on the Internet if somebody else was having the same problem. That's when I found this thread with a bunch of people having similar experiences with iDVD.

It seems that, from what I've read in the thread, iDVD is really buggy when it comes to MacBook Pros (lucky me, huumm???). And Apple doesn't seem to be doing anything about it. And in the meantime, MacBook Pro users have these powerful computers that can be used with anything else, but not Mac OS X's own video and DVD editing tools.

The reported bugs include using dynamic drop zones (such as videos), background encoding and burning directly to DVD. So I decided to change my DVD to avoid these bugs:

• Used only static drop zones (photos) and themes
  
• Disabled background encoding (Advance -> Encode in Background)
• Burned to DVD image instead of DVD drive

Once I got the DVD image ready, I used Burn to finally burn the DVD. The resulting DVD was not that amazing and sadly, to get these results, I could've easily used other simpler applications. I don't know which one of the settings was blocking my success on iDVD (or if all of them together) but this was the configuration that worked for me.

Final conclusions

These applications have a great potential, mainly because of the available features and the simplicity to use, but their unstable behavior and never-ending bugs can really turn movie/DVD-making into a nasty job. So, Apple if you're reading this... Please, please, give us a nice patch to solve these issues on our powerful MacBook Pros, because there's nothing worse than see such good potential go to waste.

What about you? Are you having the same problems? Any suggestions for solutions or other applications that are the same/better for making movies/dvds on a Mac?

Avoid Apple Remote's evil twins

If you're a teacher or have to do a lot of presentations using your mac, chances are that you already got stuck to a presentation that looks like it has been possessed by the devil, going back and forth in the slides and presenting other strange behaviors. But later on, you discover that this is only caused by a wise guy using another Apple Remote that is clicking the buttons to ruin your keynote.

To avoid these embarrassing moments (especially if you're doing a very important presentation to your boss or a client) you must "pair" your Apple Remote with your mac. To do so, follow these instructions:

1. Log in as an administrator user
2. Hold the remote close to the mac and press simultaneously the keys "Menu" and ">>|" (Fast-forward) for a few seconds
   
3. The screen will fade to black and an image with the remote and a chain link will appear, indicating that the Apple Remote is now paired to your mac

Later on, if you decide to turn off the pairing for a specific Apple Remote or if you want to disable remote controlling with the Apple Remote at all:

1. Log in as an administrator user
2. Go to "System Preferences"
3. Go to "Security"
4. On the bottom of the dialog you'll find the options you need
1. Mark "Disable remote control infrared receiver" to disable all contact between your mac and any Apple Remote
2. Or click the "Unpair" button to remove only the previously paired Apple Remote
   

Tip from MacTips

How to burn MP3s to a CD with folders on iTunes

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Whenever I needed to make a mix CD with some of my MP3s, I would always get pissed off because iTunes always puts the files directly on the root folder of the CD and ignores the folder structure that exists in the original music folder. This is very annoying especially because some MP3 players (like the ones built-in on car stereos) need that folder structure to organize the musics by artists or albums.

But now I discovered a small trick on iTunes that allows you to burn an MP3 CD maintaining all the original folder structure. All you have to do is to build a playlist with the songs you want to burn (as you would normally do on iTunes) and then in the top bar in the musics list, click the "Album" tab until this one turns into "Album by Artist".

And that's it. Then all you have to do is click the "Burn MP3 CD" button on the lower right side of iTunes and your new MP3 CD will include the original folder structure.

You can also use a year-based folder structure on the MP3 CD. Just keep clicking that same tab until a "Album by Year" column appears.

Tip from Internet Duct Tape

Macbook Air: a genius before his time

On a comment on my post about the new Macbook Air, my former colleague Ana has pointed me to ZDNet's second look on the new Apple's notebook. While I do see how some of those points may be valid, I still have the sensation that the thinnest laptop can be a sort of genius that was born before its time.

I think this is a new concept of computer, that will probably only be understood in a few years: the ultra-portable and wireless computer.

Sure, you don't have an optical drive. But nowadays you don't use a drive that much, do you? Almost all software is "downloadable" from the web. Backups can be done to external drives.

Sure, you only have one USB port. But if even the backup drives are becoming wireless, why do you need so many ports anyway?

Sure, it doesn't have an ethernet port. But if the point of the notebook is to be ultra-portable, then why invest on a "fixed" technology.

Sure, it doesn't have a removable battery. Every innovative small laptop has to make some compromises. And a removable battery is overrated. On my lifetime of "gadgetery" I only had to buy a new battery for a cellphone once.

In conclusion, I won't buy a Macbook Air. That's right, "won't"... but only because it doesn't meet my needs: I don't need a portable computer, I need a powerful computer to work on a desk.

But if I ever turn into a technological travel salesman, I'll sure buy the Macbook Air :-)

And it's here

UPDATE: you can see the full Steve Jobs keynote here.

The rumors were close and Steve Jobs finally presented the news on the Apple world (while the keynote movie is not available at Apple's site, you can read it at Engadget):

• There's in fact a new notebook, MacBook Air, the thinnest notebook ever (watch guided tour here)
  
• 1,6 or 1,8 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 2 GB memory, 13,3'' LED-backlit screen
  
• Multi-touch trackpad that allows performing iPhone-like operations
• No optical drive, but a nice wireless feature (Remote Disc) that allows connecting to nearby computers' optical drives
  

And a lot of other new products were announced:

• Movie rentals service on iTunes
• New price for Apple TV and software updates
• A wireless Time Machine-enabled hard drive: Time Capsule

Apple has done it again :-)

What are the news?

With a bit more than an hour to go until Steve Jobs gets up on stage to perform his well-known Macworld 2008 Keynote, it was expected that the Apple Store was going to be down:

The question is: what will be the new products? There are some rumors, but all we can do is wait...

Burn: the simplest CD/DVD application for the Mac

The built-in CD/DVD burning functionalities in Mac OS X are quite useful, but sometimes you just need a few more options to better control the burning task. But then, you may end up installing a complicated third-party application that requires you to execute 10 steps in a not-so-easy wizard just to burn a few files onto a CD.


Burn is an application that stands more or less in the middle. It doesn't have that many options for you to change as some CD/DVD burning applications, but it's not as simplistic as Mac OS X's Finder's burning functionalities.

It's open source, so feel free to download it if you want a simple, yet powerful CD/DVD burning software.

Change the format of the screenshot pictures

I've posted here before about the things I love in Mac OS X, one of them being the built-in screenshot grabbing shortcuts. If you don't know them, here's a quick tutorial:

• Command + Shift + 3 = image of the whole screen
• Command + Shift + 4 and then Spacebar = image of the chosen window
• Command + Shift + 4 and then mouse = image of specific region

All these create a PNG image file on the desktop with the captured image. You can use CTRL to transfer the captured image to the clipboard instead.

However, PNG format may not actually be the best format to output the screenshot since it is not so widely accepted as, for example, JPEG. So, if you want to change the output format of the screenshots, just execute the following command on a Terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg

Et voilá! From now on, every time you "grab" an image from your screen, the output format will be JPEG. You can also try other formats such as GIF. Just change the last part of the command to use gif instead of jpg.

And naturally, if you decide to get back to PNG, just add the png extension to the end of the command.

Source: MacTips

Macworld 2008: the rumors

The Macworld 2008 Conference & Expo is almost here (January, 14-18) and the rumors have been rising on the web.

Most of them point out to a new (possibly ultra-slim) notebook with excellent new features, such as multi-touch trackpads (or maybe even screens) similar to the iPhone multi-touch capabilities and a Blu-ray drive or external optical drive.

Other rumors point out to the presentation of a 3G version of iPhone.

But the most surprising rumor is the possibility of Steve Jobs presenting a dual-screen ultra-portable notebook such as this picture on the left shows.

Whether it is a dual-screen or just single-screen, some believe that the most probable innovation to be presented at the Macworld, is a kind of MacBook Touch, where the multi-touch capability and iPhone/iPod Touch-like behavior will be the most interesting feature of the new device.

You can even check out some of the (potential) scripts for Steve Jobs' keynote.

Well, I guess that all we can do is just wait for the keynote on January 15th and see if Apple can surprise us....again. I'm sure they will, but how?