Just some notes on the subject of digital video editing (iMovie4 and iDVD4).
My first project with these versions of the software proved to be successful to the level of moderate satisfaction.
iMovie4 is better and faster than it's predecessor; no audio-video sync issues, no empty-trash-loose-a-week-of-work disasters (never had those, however). One thing it does, though: if you empty the iMovie trash, it tries to screw up fade-ins/fade-outs of the imported audio clips (if you had fiddled with the volume graphs, that is. If you didn't, you are good), so you have to redo those. Not catastrophic, but annoying.
The rest works as expected, as far as I could tell.
iDVD4 is not any faster than iDVD3, at least on my machine. In fact, it's downright slow. Many new features of questionable quality, like menu transitions: dissolve looks very nice in the preview, but renders with hideous banding and pixelation - and that between menus with the same background image. Note to myself: try other transition next time, or just forget about them altogether. They only work one way, anyhow...
The "Best Quality" encoder doesn't look any better then the regular one (same "washed out" video and banding when cross-dissolving stills with solid colors), but does not allow you to encode assets without actually starting the burn procedure, so the machine was unusable for the most part of the day. Burned nicely, though: after two hours of encoding menus and transitions, and about four hours of encoding the 46 min. movie, I burned five disks at a rate of 15 min per each. Sweet.
The AutoStart feature is nice. I made a short version of opening logo sequence, and put it there. Works fine. I might try to use a custom template (this time I used "Blue Fade" third-party theme) next time, so the transition between the end of AutoStart and first menu would be smoother.
Slide show of 60 images looks as good as it could look on TV. I had "scale images to fit TV-safe area" selected in preferences, so the photos have black frame around them, which would be OK, if the TV sets wouldn't have a tendency to distort straight lines close to the edge of screen. Another note to myself: use full-screen images and hope that everything important is not clipped (i.e. shoot with overscan allowance, or frame the pics manually).
Audio is in sync with video, as it supposed to be. Always makes me happy (since iMovie3.0 crap epic).
Overall - all ends well.
I can now clean out my hard drive and start making custom loops for GarageBand.
My first project with these versions of the software proved to be successful to the level of moderate satisfaction.
iMovie4 is better and faster than it's predecessor; no audio-video sync issues, no empty-trash-loose-a-week-of-work disasters (never had those, however). One thing it does, though: if you empty the iMovie trash, it tries to screw up fade-ins/fade-outs of the imported audio clips (if you had fiddled with the volume graphs, that is. If you didn't, you are good), so you have to redo those. Not catastrophic, but annoying.
The rest works as expected, as far as I could tell.
iDVD4 is not any faster than iDVD3, at least on my machine. In fact, it's downright slow. Many new features of questionable quality, like menu transitions: dissolve looks very nice in the preview, but renders with hideous banding and pixelation - and that between menus with the same background image. Note to myself: try other transition next time, or just forget about them altogether. They only work one way, anyhow...
The "Best Quality" encoder doesn't look any better then the regular one (same "washed out" video and banding when cross-dissolving stills with solid colors), but does not allow you to encode assets without actually starting the burn procedure, so the machine was unusable for the most part of the day. Burned nicely, though: after two hours of encoding menus and transitions, and about four hours of encoding the 46 min. movie, I burned five disks at a rate of 15 min per each. Sweet.
The AutoStart feature is nice. I made a short version of opening logo sequence, and put it there. Works fine. I might try to use a custom template (this time I used "Blue Fade" third-party theme) next time, so the transition between the end of AutoStart and first menu would be smoother.
Slide show of 60 images looks as good as it could look on TV. I had "scale images to fit TV-safe area" selected in preferences, so the photos have black frame around them, which would be OK, if the TV sets wouldn't have a tendency to distort straight lines close to the edge of screen. Another note to myself: use full-screen images and hope that everything important is not clipped (i.e. shoot with overscan allowance, or frame the pics manually).
Audio is in sync with video, as it supposed to be. Always makes me happy (since iMovie3.0 crap epic).
Overall - all ends well.
I can now clean out my hard drive and start making custom loops for GarageBand.