iLife 08’s new features aren’t limited to still pictures. Video gets a bump too, with what Steve Jobs was calling an all new version of iMovie. It came about when one of Apple’s video engineers went on vacation to the Cayman Islands, shot a bunch of underwater footage, and wanted to put together a movie of it. Turned out that neither iMovie or Final Cut Pro worked for what he wanted to do, so he invented a new way which they turned into iMovie ‘08. “People ask ‘why are you obsoleting your stuff?’ We really care about this stuff and we think it’s so cool. To make movies even easier, to rediscover hidden assets, it’s fantastic.”
The new version features a library with all the video that you’ve shot, meaning that you don’t have to go out to the Finder any more. The new interface features a split view in the top half of the window showing your project on the left, and a preview on the right, along with a library in the bottom half of the window. You can use your mouse to “skim” through the video preview, and select video like you’d select text.
Music, sound effects, photos, titles, and transitions can all be added with ease, and the Share options make it a snap to export video to a variety of sources: iTunes, ipod, iPhone, Apple TV, or in a .Mac Web Gallery. You can encode in multiple resolutions for different quality downloads, even going higher than DVD if you want. And if you want to share it immediately, there’s a Share option that lets you send your movie directly to YouTube.
iMovie ‘08 will also feature support for AVCHD (Advanced Video Codec High Definition) cameras, a high definition format used in some camcorders from Panasonic and Sony.
[Image via Gizmodo]
