[MacDV] Question for Jim Heid

[Jim Heid]

I've actually wanted to respond to this query for a long time, but have been
mired in too many things and not following the list closely enough. So here
goes:

> Way back when, Craig Busch <clbusch at earthlink.net> wrote:

> In a way you are kind of a Macintosh icon.

:-)  I do look a little like Clarus the dogcow.

Seriously, thanks for the extremely kind words.

> Jim, what is your honest review of the stableness and bugfreeness (new word)
> of iLife- in particular iMovie3 and iDVD3?

I think it's obvious from the updates we've seen already that iMovie debuted
to, shall we say, mixed reviews. That said, a lot of people ARE using the
new version without significant or even any problems. For understandable
reasons, the people who tend to post about new programs tend to be having
problems with them.

I think iMovie 3 still has some rough edges, but it isn't the dogcow that a
lot of the posts here would imply. At least not in my experience. I've done
some fairly tricky editing in it (lots of KB, lots of cropping and tight
timing), and while it's no Final Cut Pro in terms of speed or stability, I
haven't sworn at it a lot, either.

iDVD 3 behaves well for me. I've seen some of the poster-frame problems that
others have reported here, but by and large, my experiences have been
positive.

Let's take a moment to remember that each of the new iLife programs replaced
versions that had seen several decimal-portion revisions. We will
undoubtedly see these apps tweaked some more in the weeks and months to come
-- glitches and unforeseen incompatibilities are inevitable with new
software releases.

Fortunately, things do settle down over time and we're all able to
concentrate on our creations again.

Or, to put it poetically:

     iLife is like life
            It isn't always perfect
     But it beats Windows.

-Jim

--
Jim Heid
Author/Host, "The Macintosh iLife" book/DVD
200 full-color pages plus 90+ minute training DVD
Pre-order from Amazon for $20.99 -- go to http://snurl.com/x87
(It's off the presses -- I get my author's copies tomorrow!)