[corp miler]

What notable enhancements are there between iDVD/iMovie 3 and 5? I bought version 3 when audio editing became possible and love the program. Version 4 didn’t seem to have any enhancements worth it to me to upgrade. I went to the store to try out 5 expecting to spent the $80 on iLife and wasn’t overly impressed (in the update). There seems to be a high emphasis on HD and 16:9 (which I do not have a HD camera), along with new transitions and effects (mostly which I won’t use). That is all great, but I just didn’t seen anything substantial worth the cost. Did I overlook something? Is the compression quality better, can you burn a 90 minute video without reduced quality, will iDVD quit hanging up now, etc? Thanks for your help.

[Josh Reid]

Hey,

I agree that the update from iMovie 3 to iMovie 4 wasn't very ground-breaking, and initially I felt the same way about iMovie 5. HD and widescreen meant nothing to me. However, I did purchase it and I decided to just give it a try playing around with a few minutes of raw footage I had sitting on my hard drive. This was on a 1Ghz Powerbook, with only the 256MB stock ram. My 512MB chip had recently gone bad, so I was expecting iMovie to hang and beach-ball-bitch with only 256. Shockingly, it handled transitions, cuts, sound pastes, rendering extremely well. No crashes or major hangings. I was quite impressed with the background performance changes with the update to '05, and can't wait to see how it will be when I get a new 512mb ram chip back in there.

If you do much editing at all, I highly recommend the update for iMovie & iDVD, especially since you'll be coming all the way from the '03 versions.

Hope this helps,
Josh

[corp miler]

Josh, thanks for the feedback. I also work on a 1ghz PowerBook. I have the ram maxed out and still have problems with iDVD hanging up nearly 2 out of 3 burns. I do a fair amount of editing, but just for personal use. Typically I’ll take 4-5 hours of raw video (vacation mostly) and condense it to 1 hour of video you won’t fall asleep to. Since its mainly for family videos, I hate to spend over $80 on something that isn’t much different from what I own. My issues with 3 are video quality (the raw video has a slightly better resolution than the DVD I create) and stability. I’m still on the fence, but at least I’m back on the fence. Thanks again.