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March 08, 2007
Making the most of iLife seminars
Apple has a series of online video seminars that outline how to use the personal tools that come with every Mac "to create professional looking marketing materials like newsletters, presentations, podcasts, movies, photobooks and web sites."
The tools are all personal - iPhoto, Garageband, iMovie, iWeb, and Keynote - but the application is for small business users. In other words, the seminars show you how to use the tools created for Mom, for small business purposes. The seminars are great, if only to show you what you can do, and give you an idea of how easy it is. Each segment is about 10-15 minutes long, and the series is about an hour long.
The series is done in a TV magazine style, with David Griswold, Founder of Sustainable Harvest coffee company being interviewed by an Apple Rep, and demonstrating how their small company uses the iLife tools. This format makes the videos a lot more watch-able than many tutorial demonstrations which rely solely on images of a computer screen and voice over.
Incidentally, the quality of the videos is astounding. When I launched the first one, I nearly fell off my chair. I suppose we've all become so accustomed to seeing YouTube videos that our expectations are quite low. The videos are very similar to digital TV quality. If I tell QuickTime to display it at double the size, the image is HD (high definition) size and the titles remain crisp and clean, which is pretty amazing, as they start playing within about 2 seconds.
The only down-side is you need to register. There's a "Register" button at the top right of the page.
QuickTime tip:
The videos will launch in QuickTime player. To make them display at twice the size, select "Double Size" from QuickTime's "View" menu. Alternatively, hold the APPLE key and press '2.'
Note: iLife (iPhoto, GarageBand, iTunes, iMovie HD, iDVD, iWeb) is included with every new Mac. It is not included when you buy a new major version of Mac OS X. And if you want to upgrade iLife, you need to buy the box. (About $89 Cdn. £55 UK)
Posted by Brad at March 8, 2007 12:46 PM
