My iLife
28 Jan 2009 |The word on the street is that Apple’s iLife ‘09 has finally been released here in Japan! I guess that means that I’m off to pick up my copy tonight! Hopefully they have it at Sofmap store near Kyoto Station. They usually get Apple products on their release days. That would save me a trip to the Shinsaibashi Apple Store in Osaka.
I’m mostly looking forward to iPhoto’s new Faces and Places features, but I’m also interested in iMovie’s new video stabilization feature. I have some seriously shaky video of our off-road desert tour in Dubai and I can’t wait to see how well iMovie cleans it up. The demo for video stabilization looks amazing, so I’m pretty hopeful! I didn’t really like iMovie ‘08, so I reverted to the previous version. Hopefully iMovie ‘09 will renew my interest in Apple’s consumer video editing software!
Update: 2009.01.31
Well, I managed to snag one of the few remaining copies of iLife ‘09 at Sofmap Kyoto on release day. I’ve had it a few days now and all I can say is wow! It’s really great! I’m especially impressed with iPhoto’s Faces feature. It took several hours to process my whole library, but one it was finished it found family and friends with ease! It was especially accurate when finding Azusa’s face. Out of thousands of pictures it only returned two false positives. Amazing stuff!
As for my shaky Dubai video, well… Maybe I expected too much? iMovie did a good job of stabilizing my video, but not as much as I had hoped. I’ll see if I can post the before and after videos later today.
Update: 2009.02.01
I posted the stabilized video of our Dubai desert tour up on YouTube. You can watch it by clicking here. Remember, the original is hardly watchable, so shaky as it may be, this is a big improvement!
February 5th, 2009 at 6:54 am
Watched the video. All I can say is “you must have expected a miracle if you aren’t happy with that!”