iLife '06 (iDVD 6) review

Just as a new release of iLife has become an annual January event, so it is that each new release will heavily feature Apple's current flavour of the month. Last year, it was high-definition video; this year, it's video blogging and podcasting.

Apple has turned GarageBand into a podcast-creation studio, and is now billing iMovie HD as a tool for creating 'video podcasts and blogs'. However, there's more to this release than the ability to stick short films about the exciting minutae of your life on a .Mac site.

Perhaps the most immediately obvious of iMovie HD's new features is the addition of themes. If you've ever used iDVD, you'll know what to expect. These highly polished, professionally designed templates incorporate your clips or photos to create opening and closing sequences, and chapter transitions that wouldn't look out of place on mid-budget TV drama series. They're as easy to use as the rest of the application (that is, it takes a few minutes of fiddling to figure out what you're doing, but after that you're flying) and add a professional sheen to projects. They're far from an essential addition and, like all standard themes in Apple products, they do look like pre-produced templates, despite their polish. Nonetheless, they're pretty impressive.

Second on the checklist of new features is what Apple calls realtime effects. What this means is that iMovie can access system-level Core Video effects and use them in clips. As such, you can adjust brightness, contrast and colour, and simulate aged film or even an earthquake. Real time, in this instance, means iMovie renders the effects in the background while you preview them or continue editing the project. Partnering the video effects are new audio effects. These combine a range of Core Audio effects such as noise reduction, reverb and pitch change, with effects from Skywalker studios - perfect for adding the sound of howling wind to your own Blair Witch Project.

The ability to have multiple projects open at once will be a boon to users who need to work on more than one project at a time. Particularly useful is the option to drag and drop clips between projects.

The video podcasting features amount to the ability to add chapter markers and live URLs to projects, while there's a new iWeb option in the Share menu to allow you to publish your video and submit it to the iTunes Podcast Directory.

iMovie feels more sluggish than previous versions, and we found it only just usable on our PowerBook G4 867MHz. It was stable, but we noticed some strange behaviour when we added photos to a project using the iPhoto viewer: every now and again, the Ken Burns Effect floating window would fail to appear and there would be no way to edit a photo after it had been added to the window.

The new features in iMovie HD 6 are interesting and will be useful to some. However, none of them are groundbreaking or essential. Part of the problem is that iMovie is so good that improving it becomes increasingly difficult. Nice problem to have.

So what about iDVD 6? iDVD is a less mature application than iMovie in chronological terms, but it's every bit as impressive. The biggest single improvement and the one that will make many potential iDVD users jump for joy is the support for third-party DVD burners. Finally. Now anyone with a DVD burner can create DVDs on a Mac without having to shell out for DVD Studio Pro.

iDVD 6 borrows one of iMovie HD's most impressive features, Magic iMovies, which Apple has re-dubbed Magic iDVD. You pick a theme, select the movies and photos you want to include and iDVD does the rest. If you don't want the hassle of creating your own menus and buttons, or you're short of time, it's a great way to knock out a quick DVD.