iLife 09 has landed!

Thanks go out to Charles at the Beaverton Mac Store for letting me know that iLife was in stock!

I picked up my copy (and iWork as well) and have it fully installed.

iMovie won’t import the MPEG-2 movie files our team’s HD camera generates without a component from Apple, so I converted the file to H.264 with HandBrake. That file plays in QuickTime Player but iMovie would not let me select it for import either.

I imported the entire folder of one movie and iMovie has been doing something for about 5 minutes now. The video file was 834mb and 90 minutes long, so maybe it is making thumbnails. All I see is a spinning cursor, so I am just guessing.

iPhoto upgraded my library (yes I created a clone and a time capsule backup first!) and it is now scanning my photos for faces. Initial estimate was 140 minutes. 10 minutes later that is down to 83 minutes left.

iPhoto remains usable while the face detection is going on. I’m looking forward to see if people I know are in photos I didn’t know they were in, for example random shots of crowds at Disneyland. That would be fun eh?

iPhoto said I could continue to use it while scanning faces. I tried to see if my iPhoto export plugin BetterHTMLExport still functioned and current it is not loading, so I’ll look into that. I clicked the new Slideshow tab and that stalled iPhoto for about 40 seconds. I am not sure what it was doing as my event only had one photo

Ok iMovie is done doing whatever it was doing. That import process needs some user interface

Sweet! I really put iMovie though the ringer with a 90 minute, 845mb clip. I have a quad core Mac Pro and the editing was a little jumpy but still totally usable.

I chose a comic book theme and it added a opening template to the video and a closing credits template, which had the video rotated and inset.

I tried to add a lower third text overlay to the clip but that just didn’t seem to want to work properly on a 90 minute clip. I broke the clip up with a smaller 1 minute subclip and then the overlay worked fine. What is cool is the text overlay was animated. It popped and rotated onto the scene, then did the same at the end of the text overlay.

The comic book theme has many overlays, scrolling credits, etc all designed to work together.

I am now exporting the entire video in large format to see what it looks like. Estimated time is 5 hours. Handbrake converted the entire thing in 30 minutes so we’ll see how well iMovie holds up.

Back in iPhoto, faces says it has 66 minutes to go.

Trying to debug my plugin issue, I noticed that iPhoto is complaining in console about a plugin:

1/27/09 5:03:22 PM iPhoto[227] Not a valid plugin: /Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/PlugIns/Facebook.iPhotoExporter

iPhoto supports Facebook, but this plugin might exist from Facebook themselves; Their exporter should have been installed in Library, but some developers are still installing right into iPhoto.

I opened up the iPhoto application and the date on the Facebook Plugin is from August of last year, while every other plugin is from January 14 of this year. So I’ll move it to the desktop and relaunch iPhoto….

At the same time I noticed BetterHTMLExport is nowhere to be found, so I’ll investigate that next.

Quitting iPhoto goes through a process of backing up meta data which is nice. Another thing to look into later……..

Ok reinstalling BetterHTMLExport restored the plugin to /Library/Application Support/iPhoto/Plugins/ I guess the iLife installed deleted existing plugins without warning. How rude!

I am happy to report that iPhoto 8.0 (iLife ’09) and BetterHTMLExport are compatible!

Upon relaunching iPhoto, Faces picked up scanning faces where it left off, so that is very nice.

I’ll report more later!