Enjoying the iLife

Life

When you’re having fun at home with your computer and you want to do something creative, all you need is Apple’s innovative iLife software pack.

Apple iLife gives you five superb creative tools to manage all of the things you value – your music, your photos and your home movies. Just think of what iLife could help you create and the multimedia memories you could share with friends.

The first application iTunes allows you to organise your music; the second, GarageBand, enables you to make your own music without the need for professional expertise.

With the third, iPhoto, you can edit your photos and create a lovely coffee-table book filled with your favourite snaps.

iDVD lets you create Hollywood-like DVDs with your photos, video and music.

Finally, iMovie lets you edit your own home movies by turning your raw video footage from a DV camcorder into professional quality and all in very user-friendly, drag and drop windows (We will have more on this on this next month).

3G retail stores has partnered with Apple to make it easy for consumers to experience and explore the exciting creative opportunities made possible by Apple iLife. Consumers are invited to call into any of the 3G nationwide for free demonstrations by highly trained and friendly staff.

We will help you explore the creative brilliance and user-friendliness of iLife by showing you just what each of the tools in the suite can do. This month we look at how iDVD 5 makes it really easy for you to take your favourite photos, add your favourite music and create a slideshow on a DVD disc so that you can show those photos to your family and friends on your TV by playing them back on your DVD player.

Create a DVD with a slideshow of your photos with music

So you have been away for the weekend or abroad on holiday, taken loads of photos and you naturally want to show them to your family and friends. Instead of passing around a bunch of printed photos why not create a slideshow on DVD with interesting transitions between the photos? Then add some of your favourite music from your iTunes library. Then sit back with your friends and relive the fantastic time you had by viewing the photos on TV, with of course the great background music to liven things up.
The photos have been taken off the camera and are stored in iPhoto and sorted into Albums.  Using iDVD 5 these photos will be transformed into your great show. Launching iDVD 5, and selecting Create A New Project, you will be asked to name the project. Once done, the main screen appears with a tool bar positioned along the bottom.  It is now time to get creative.

Select a theme
By clicking on the Customize button you are presented with a list of Themes. These are ready-made templates, which is a combination of a background with audio and buttons for navigating through the DVD – basically what you will see on the TV when you insert the disk into the DVD player. These are all customisable. There are a vast quantity to choose from. In this example we chose Lines as the theme. To customise our theme using iDVD 5 Drop Zones you can drag and drop images directly onto the theme. Simply click on Media to view the albums we have created in iPhoto. Choose the photos for the menu of the DVD and drag them to the Drop Zones in the main window.  Now, click on the title and rename it.  Using the Slideshow button at the bottom, create the buttons for the individual slideshows.

Importing images and audio
Click on Map and you can view your project in diagram format. Click on the first slide and add the photos to this window by dragging and dropping from our iPhoto albums. You can then set about arranging the order in which they appear, the transitions between slides and the duration the slide appears. You can also add music to accompany it simply by dropping a digital music file such as an AAC or MP3 file onto the audio icon. When you are finished with this, you then click Return to get back to the main screen. Repeat this process for the remaining slideshows. The settings can be altered for each slideshow to add variety to the DVD.

Saving the original images
You may have spent a great deal of time touching up and cropping your photos for the iDVD project. iDVD 5 lets you to burn these original image files onto the DVD-R so they can be saved and archived. The movie will play normally on a DVD player and TV, but when inserted into a computer, the saved images can be found in a folder called DVD ROM contents.
From the main menu at the top of the screen, select iDVD*Preferences*Slideshow. Select Always add original slideshow photos to DVD-ROM.

Take precautions
The project is almost done.  All that remains is to burn the DVD. It is worth taking a few precautions at this point. Encoding and burning DVDs uses a lot of the computer’s power so it is best not to have any other applications running. If you are using an Apple PowerBook or iBook make sure it is powered from the mains. Before burning the DVD, make sure there is at least twice as much free disk space available than what the project uses, to allow for encoding and burning. To view the size the project check Project size in the Status menu in the Customise drawer. Finally, make sure the computer does not to go into Sleep mode during the burn process.  Click on System Preferences in the dock and select Energy Saver under the heading Sleep, and make sure that Never is selected under Put Computer to Sleep.

Burning the DVD
You can now proceed to burning your slideshow DVD. Click the Burn button on the bottom right of the main screen. Place a DVD-R in the drive when prompted. iDVD first encodes the project’s information and then burns it to the disc. Progress of the encoding and burning can be viewed as it happens. DVD-R is the recommended format, but iDVD 5 also supports DVD-RW, DVD+R, and DVD+RW disks. Do not do anything until the screen with the caption Burning Finished appears. Click on this and you are ready to view your DVD.  Now all you have to do is gather your family around the TV or call your friends around. Slip your newly created DVD disk into the player and sit back and enjoy the memories.

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