Festive finesse

Published: 12:00am, 26 Nov 2006

We are approaching the time of year when those with Macs will be taxing their machines to the limit. Seasonal gatherings and new digital toys mean hundreds of photos and dozens of videos will be edited, numerous holiday CDs burned and annual newsletters created, and myriad customised holiday communications and gifts fabricated. Phew! Nonetheless, I'm looking forward to it.

Apple has anticipated, or perhaps created, some of this need by designing a slew of applications for making these seasonal projects easy: iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD and GarageBand. These gems are close to perfection for their simplicity and all-round utility, but they can always be improved. The Mac shareware developers of the world have recognised this and created an array of improvement apps that make these Apple gems more impressive.

Let's start with iPhoto. Its biggest flaw is it can't recognise multiple libraries.

This can be fixed with the free iPhoto Librarian www.scruffyware.com/products/iPhotoLibrarian.html). This application allows you to break up your massive iPhoto collection into numerous little ones. The result is a much-faster-running iPhoto and the ability to store your space-intensive libraries on external drives.

I also like to place comments on photos that I distribute to show off my sense of humour or insight. Frankly, it's probably my worst habit. The tool I use is Comic Life (US$24.95; plasq.com/comiclife), which lets you make cartoons or comic strips from your iPhoto library using assorted voice balloons.

If iMovie is your poison then its main deficiency is a lack of special effects. Take, for example, iMovie's time/motion controls. The slow motion in iMovie is adequate but the array of special motions found in Stupendous Software's Time Effects (US$25; www.stupendous-software.com/Stupendous/TimeEffects/Pages/index.html), such as Motion Blur and the Time Warp plug-ins, can effectively show your characters as they really are - shaky, zippy, sleepy or even otherworldly.

I like to combine still photography with motion, something iMovie and iPhoto don't do adequately. I'm not referring to the Ken Burns effect, in which the application zooms and scans the photo to give the impression of motion; I'm talking about animation effects like the ones used in claymation movies. With iStopMotion (US$39.95; www.istopmotion.com), you don't need to be a clay sculptor to make films this way. You can use a straw, a chalkboard, sequential photographs or even characters cut from brown paper bags. You just use iStopMotion and your iSight camera, and your vision will manifest miraculously, one frame at a time.

You can use iStopMotion to record the decoration of a Christmas tree, one ornament at a time, and the gathering of gifts at its base, then bring it all into iMovie for final editing to show everyone opening their presents and taking down the ornaments at ultra-high speed. Not only will you have captured the perfect video card for next year, you may also be eligible for YouTube fame.

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