Northern Vermont Macintosh Users Group

Scott Pelok demonstrated iLife before an attentive audience. The report of the meeting written for the Caledonian Record is included, and pictures will be available on our web page version of this report. Also, reviews of a new O'Reilly series of publications, a new NVMUG library, a new friend in Peachpit Press, and other items of interest.

Past NVMUG President demonstrates iLife

Scott Pelok demonstrated iLife at the Northern Vermont Macintosh User Group, NVMUG, meeting at the Old Mill in St. Johnsbury Saturday. Using iLife, Scott started with a music program, iTunes, combined it with a photography program, iPhoto, made them into a movie with iMovie, and told how they can be used to create DVDs with iDVD.

Scott Pelok was a dentist in St. Johnsbury for about five years, and used to be the president of NVMUG. Scott and Geri Durka-Pelok come back from Michigan almost every year to visit their friends, including Richard and Midge Lubot. Midge is the current president of NVMUG.

Scott teaches dentistry, dental surgery, and the use of computers in dentistry and dental education to graduate students at the University of Michigan. They have mostly Macintosh computers in their lab. Scott also is a Vice President of Mac Technics, one of the oldest Macintosh user groups. Geri is just one course away from completing her Masters in Information Science.

Scott began by demonstrating iTunes. He has 2,300 of his tunes on his laptop computer, seven days worth of music. He showed how you can sort music in iTunes and store it in folders called playlists.

He showed how easy it is to do some editing in iPhoto, and to sort and store photos in albums. Using iPhoto you can search for albums in that are in iTunes and select tunes to accompany your slide show. It is also easy to e-mail your photos, to print them, to order them in books, or to burn them to a CD.

Using iMovie Scott searched for and found iMovie scenes, QuickTime movie scenes, and iPhoto stills to use as scenes. By default, the iPhoto scenes were activated using pan and zoom effects like those in the Ken Burns documentaries. Using iMovie, Scott imported music from iTunes albums, shorten them to fit, and set them on a track next to his iMovie scenes. He said he was not showing the fancy stuff, but just how easily you can create a simple movie.

Scott did not show iDVD because his older Powerbook laptop did not have the Superdrive needed to record DVDs, but DVDs can me made from tunes, photos, and movies and combined into Chapters within the DVD to view on your computer or TV.

Scott is an Assistant Director of Advanced Education in General Dentistry at the University of Michigan. Scott also practices dentistry, and his camera has a special attachment with circular flash tube to take pictures of teeth. For some reason, people asked him to use his pictures of dragonflies instead of teeth in his demonstration.

Scott has 2,300 tunes on his laptop, but 6,000 on his music hard drive at home. He also has a photo hard drive and one used for all other purposes. Geof has four times as many.

Scott stressed using playlists, albums, scenes, and chapters to organize music, photos, movies, and DVD material respectively.

Stephen asked Scott to discuss storage of music. He said this was sure to confuse most people. You can choose where the music library is stored in Preferences Ñ> Advanced Preferences. I believe Scott advised not to check " copy files to iTunes Music folder" because that creates redundant files. Scott keeps his music in a music folder on a separate hard drive at home and not under his name so he and Geri can share music. He has three 120 gig hard drives, one for music, one for movies, and one for everything else. Most people like to keep music files in one location. ( I keep my files in one location on a separate hard drive because the hard drive in my iBook is pretty small, but I am sure that I do not understand how the iTunes or iPhoto file structures really work.)

Scott recommends using alternative playlists in iTunes and albums in iPhoto so when working in iMovie you do not have to sort through all the tunes and photos. He pulled a set of tunes into a playlist (folder) that he had created for that purpose.

Scott had 62 photos on his camera when he plugged it into his computer to see if the automatic downloading would work. It worked, but it took some time.

iPhoto stores pictures in whatever format they come in. In most cases the photograph files are organized by the date and time that the picture was taken. iPhoto can export out as TIFF or JPEG. A picture that takes 30 seconds to store as TIFF may take less than a second as JPEG. About 200 images took about 313 megs to store.

iPhoto 3 has expanded editing capability, but limited compared to Photoshop Elements 2. In iPhoto you can rotate the image, get rid of red eye, crop it and export the cropped image to print, constrain the photo to a certain size, rename it, and export it as JPEG, TIFF, or PNG. PNG preserves the color clarity better than JPEG, but resolution may not be as good and file size is much larger. PNG does support transparencies which JPEG and TIFF do not.

Photoshop has quality ratings from 1 to 12 when saving a JPEG. Nobody can see a difference in image projected onto a screen at ratings above 8. Geri said that ratings of 10 - 12 are used for images to be printed in magazines, but JPEG photos are not considered book quality. Printers generally prefer TIFF images.

When you order a book printed on line from an iPhoto album, it is printed on both sides of the paper for a bound book. Staples may have paper that allows you to print on both sides on your printer. You can select different book formats, and change page designs within a format.

Mac OS 10.2.4 and Mac OS 10.2.5 allow burning in sessions.

Scott attempted to export to a DVD from iPhoto, but does not have a Superdrive on is Powerbook. This crashed iPhoto, which could result in loss of unsaved work, but it did not crash his computer (as would have been true in earlier operating systems). It just took a second to restart iPhoto.

Scott was at a meeting in San Antonio and took some digital movie shots on the River Walk, and at the Alamo. He said every 6 minutes of raw video takes up one meg of hard drive space. Ted said that he found 4.5 to 5 minutes per gig was more realistic. Scott dragged his movie clips into iMovie. Then he used iMovie to brows his iPhoto stills and selected a dragonfly photo. When he dragged the photo into iMovie it came in with a Ken Burns zoom and pan effect by default. It is possible, but not as easy, to create a still frame. Once the clip is in you can add one of iMovie's effects such as rain. The rain will continue for the length of the clip. You can make the still clip as long as you want to, but the default is five seconds.

There is audio capability within iMovie3. Scott used the iMovie browser to bring a song from iTunes to an iMovie sound track. He dragged it to set its length. He selected a second song, and adjusted its length. It was not difficult to fade a song out, but cross fading between one song track and a second song track was difficult. You can also record a voice over for your movies, and fade the background music during voice over. Scott recommends getting a USB microphone, about $50, in place of the internal microphone.

There are more professional movie editing programs like Final Cut Pro with its steep learning curve that can overlap sound tracks. Scott briefly showed a sound editing program, Peak DV which now had an OS X version, which could be used to edit sound before importing it to iMovie.

If Scott had the Superdrive to burn DVDs, and if he pushed the right button, iMovie would build the movie into iDVD. iDVD has advantages like full screen viewing, menu buttons, and Chapters. Scott teaches his students in dentistry to create training videos.

Scott's purpose was to demonstrate how iLife brings the packages together, not to show all the features within the individual packages. He recommends playing with the individual programs. For example, build lists of iMovie clips which you might show in an iDVD. DVD blanks are now down to around $2.00 and CDs to 50 cents.

Scott then took a few minutes to talk about TIFF, JPG , GIF and resolution.

TIFF preserves all color and resolution but creates large files.

JPEG preserves 16 million colors, but loses resolution each time.

GIF belongs to Compuserve has only 256 colors, but is otherwise lossless.

All Mac projectors are limited to the 72 dpi screen, high definition screens have up to 96 dpi,

Scott's raw TIFF format has 1200 dpi, 1142 X 768 pixels which requires 3.4 megs, but which saves in 1.2 megs as JPEG. He flipped two image displays of teeth at these definitions, and the TIFF and JPEG images were identical - the only thing that changed were the letters in the specification. Then he did the same with the image at 72 dpi, which stored in only 144k. There was still not difference in the projected pictures. The image dropped down to 84k by going to an 8 quality JPEG, with no noticeable difference in the image. Where you are going with the picture and what you are using it for makes all the difference.

When using Photoshop, or Photoshop Elements 2, Image —> Adjust —> Image Size, uncheck Resampling Image so the pixel size stays the same.

300 dpi is generally good enough for printing. Somewhere around 450 you can't see the difference in print quality with more dpi. However, still going to 600 dpi because some printers have it. Scott scans 35 mm slides at 1200 x 1000 dpi for 300 dpi prints and keeps the original size (now going to 600 dpi)?

Scott showed a 1930's black and white photo that he repaired in about an hour and a half using Photoshop 7.

Photoshop and Photoshop Elements 2 have layers for editing. Photoshop Elements 2 is fantastic bargain. Buy it.

Photoshop 7 has a new healing brush, not available in Elements 2. Scott selected a source area with the Healing Brush, then dragged it across or down cracks in the old photo and they Quickly disappeared. The healing brush does the work of about five other tools including a clone, blur, and rub.

Photoshop 7 also has a Patch tool. With the Patch tool you choose the patch option and draw around the area in the picture that you want to patch to select it. You then drag this selection over the area of the picture that you want to use as the source of the patch. It is fixed.

Scott showed an image of teeth that looked pretty ugly. Then he showed a Photoshop image of what these teeth should look like when corrected. They sent the picture to the lab, and the lab created veneers for the teeth. Scott showed a picture of the new teeth. They matched the Photoshop creation. Magic - with an estimated cost of maybe $4,000.

Thanks to Gail Murphy and Apple we had some note pads, T-shirts, and posters to distribute. Midge took home a lot for future NVMUG use.

We had a drawing at the meeting for an O'Reilly book, Mac OS X Hacks, reviewed below. The winner was a new member, Joshua Solphrin.

We are starting a new NVMUG library so that we can all share the books. O'Reilly's Google Hacks will be one of the first books in our library which Midge will maintain.