iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand all saw upgrades today at Apple’s Back to the Mac event. They’ve added some advanced features that make handling, creating, and sharing your media more efficient and easier to deal with. iPhoto takes more advantage of full-screen and easily shares photos on Facebook. iMovie makes creating trailers and adding effects a breeze. GarageBand ‘11 adds more effects and a nifty “How Did I Play” feature.
iPhoto ‘11, in addition to taking full advantage of full-screen mode, integrates with Facebook to make sharing and engaging easier. Browsing through your thumbnails is much easier and iPhoto ‘11 now does smart things like grouping similar photos based on their content. Sharing photos on Facebook is easy and you can see comments made on your FB photos right inside the app.
iMovie ‘11 adds more advanced audio controls. You won’t need a degree in audio engineering to make simple edits to your soundtrack and vocals. The visual waveform gives you immediate feedback about changes you’ve made. Adding advanced digital effects and transitions is as simple as selecting where you want it and clicking away. The most interesting feature comes in creating trailers using a wizard-like format. You pick the type of trailer, iMovie ‘11 tells you which types of clips to put where, and you can even pick original background music recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra.
GarageBand ‘11 brings more guitar and amp effects and a feature called Groove Matching. Apple’s Xander Soren say “it’s like an automatic spellchecker for bad rhythm.” For you music folks out there, it sounds like it quantizes your notes. For everyone else, I’d look at it like auto-tune, but it keeps your notes on beat instead of in tune. “How Did I Play” is an interesting mix of Rock Band and music class. It visually shows you which notes you hit correctly and which you missed as you play. Flex Time “lets you move, stretch or shorten individual notes by clicking on just the part of the audio waveform you want to change.”
You can get iLife ‘11 immediately for $49 from apple.com, your local Apple Store, or an authorized Apple retailer.
via Engadget