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Facial recognition is working pretty well for me so far. It definitely isn't marking faces or identifying people all the time, but I can already see a notable improvement in accuracy after confirming just a very small subset of my 22,000+ photos. I'm wondering if people with smaller libraries have better or worse results. It seems like the initial faces database build would benefit from a large set of data to draw from. I've also found that it actually will recognize faces with sunglasses or partially obscured, which is interesting because I've seen people specifically say they've had issues with that.
 
Imovie 09 Issue!

I've hit an issue w/iMovie 09. I have about 6 active projects which, luckily, I had already exported. Out of the 6, 3 of them lost their audio tracks. Even though they referenced audio sources that are still in the same location on my hard drive.

One of the projects had a very customized audio track that might be hard for me to replicate. The other two used songs from iTunes. When I dragged back in the songs from iTunes, and play the project, the project starts to get choppy on simple play back from within iMovie. The other projects which didn't have this audio issue playback just fine. I haven't done an export yet, so I'm not sure if it's impacting export.

So, in short, for me some kind of issue has cropped up when I upgraded while leaving my projects in place. It seems to be related to the audio track link breaking. I should have backed up my projects first, I'm sure.
 
GarageBand crashes when trying to launch a lesson

I have a problem with GarageBand and lessons. This was the main feature that I was psyched about when buying iLife '09 but I can't get any lesson to launch.
I have the required system and have tried just about everything in the book to get this to work but it's not cooperating with me.

System: iMac 24" 2.4 GHz intel Core 2 Duo w/ 2GB ram OS 10.5.6

I have a thread on the Apple Discussions board in case anyone has a suggestion to remedy my problem.
 
Looks like iPhoto is going to take 3 hours to go through my photos with the face recognition on my 2GHZ macbook....whew.
 
If you run a "lab of Macs" then perhaps you should be thinking about using Pro software rather than Home software? There's a reason why Apple differentiates these products, you know ...

Cheers

Jim

Jim, we only use iMovie to give our future teachers experience using video editing. We also teach them pinnacle on the PC for this reason. Chances are these are the programs they will be using when they go to elementary schools or high schools to teach. It does them no good to know how to use final cut.

Our visual design department that teaches full blown video editing do use the Pro Apps. Either way, its extremely annoying that such a simple feature as specifying where to create a new project was removed from '08.
 
So the package just includes the same version of iDVD as before? Not even any new themes?

I'm not sure I want to pay full price for a package that only includes half the apps changed and the other half the same as I already have.

iPhoto - Updated.
iMovie - Updated.
GarageBand - Updated.
iWeb - Updated.
iDVD - Not updated.

That's 4 out of 5 applications updated, not half.

Apple believes that burning DVD discs is on its way out. They haven't even updated DVD Studio Pro since 2005.

Personally, iDVD was the reason I first switched back to the Mac. However, I seldom use it (maybe once or twice per year), but that doesn't mean I want it going anyway anytime soon either. :)
 
It isn't perfect, but finding and correcting all the faces was kinda fun for me. I tagged a picture of my 18 month old daughter and it found pictures from when she was a newborn. THAT was pretty impressive.
 
iphoto 09 notes from me:
1- facebook integration is nice, but facebook worked well on a mac prior, this is better though.
2- unimpressed that no new book formats were offered, nor any new printing options. i was hoping apple would finally offer a leather bound book like many other companies offer.

was an easy install, works fine so far, but obviously need more time with it to work and get into the suite to see how it works on more programs
 
Strange "Places" here in the UK with iPhoto 09

Well I've just about completed tagging all the people in my iPhoto library. Seemed to work ok, but needed a lot of prompting. Very rarely did it actually put a name to a face, but most faces were detected.

However, I'm have a lot my problems with "Places". I live in England and most of the places I've taken photos in can me linked to a local town or city. Great. Except it's impossible to search for most major UK towns. They are just not found. When you do drop a pin on the map, for some bizarre reason, the location is given as a nearby village???

Most of my location tags now just have "England -> Other -> Place Name". Google maps seems fine via the website. It's a shame I can't edit some of the location tags. I wish it would include the county information, rather then just "England".

Looking forward to the next update ;-)

Daniel
 
iWeb '09

Has anyone had the chance to put iWeb '09 through its paces yet? Does it contain any interesting new features other than FTP publishing and the new widget types? (I was hoping for blog categories, tags and RSS feeds for comments, but I'm not holding my breath... :rolleyes:)
 
So, I've spent the day face-tagging and geo-tagging my 16k+ images. Phew! So what can I say. 70% of the faces were detected. 30% were not even detected as faces, even in high quality shots. Blurry backgrounds seems to distract the algorithm. A shirt with a square-patterns that I wear in some photos seems to generate in false face detections on the actual shirt. Kind of funny.

I forgot to mention something when it comes to the face recognition. It seems to work really on people with dark hair and dark eyebrows. But on people like me and my girlfriend who are blond, slightly red/blond haired scandinavians there is about 30% face detection. Detection, not recognition which is even worse. As i mentioned earlier. iPhoto recognizes my shirt more often that it recognize my face.
 
It isn't perfect, but finding and correcting all the faces was kinda fun for me. I tagged a picture of my 18 month old daughter and it found pictures from when she was a newborn. THAT was pretty impressive.

That is pretty impressive! Let's pray that iLife '10 will do paternity tests and finally put The Maury Show out of business.
 
iphoto 09 notes from me:

no new book formats were offered, nor any new printing options. i was hoping apple would finally offer a leather bound book like many other companies offer.

Are you sure? Because Schiller went on about the iPhoto books in the keynote. I believe they now have both a glossy book cover in addition to printing on the actual cover.

Also, they got travel maps. :D
 
DV video quality

Is iMovie '09 providing normal quality from content in DV format? DV quality from '08 was horrible.
 
However, I'm have a lot my problems with "Places". I live in England and most of the places I've taken photos in can me linked to a local town or city. Great. Except it's impossible to search for most major UK towns. They are just not found. When you do drop a pin on the map, for some bizarre reason, the location is given as a nearby village???

Same problem with Sweden, the work around is to click on the "new location" button which takes you to the "my places" dialog box where you can locate the places more easily although in my opinion that is way to many steps to actually locate a place.
 
Does anyone know if the new version of iMovie allows you to specify where you want to make a new project? iMovie 6 does, iMovie '08 doesn't. I run labs of Macs with network home directories so the default movie folder isn't an option and has basically made iMovie '08 completely useless so we have been running iMovie 6, but I would like to always have the latest and greatest so our students learn the newest stuff.

I'm pretty sure you could do this even with iMovie 08. Whenever I plugged in an exernal hard drive It would show up in the browser in iMovie as a spot to save projects to, and i would use. It would create an iMove folder just as it does in your regular movies folder, and would save projects and content to that folder. I can verify that network mounts show up in the browser as well. Please specify if you are trying to save to the machine itself or their network folders (which, if you arent dealing with HD and you have gig-ethernet, you shouldnt have too much of a problem with network drives unless students are doing serious editing or you're worried about space).
 
Impressions

Was one of the lucky Best Buy purchasers on Mon...been using for 2 days.

iPhoto - in short it recognized about 60-70% (13,000+). Pretty impressed with the whole idea. Places is nice, but 99% of my pictures were not geotagged (most cameras don't have the capability).

iMovie - VERY impressed. So easy to manipulate details of movies. Considerable improvement from iMovie 08'

iWeb - haven't tried out again

Garage Band - I'm an acoustic guitar player, and really enjoy the new lessons feature. Very simple.
 
Wow... CATS and DOGS????
What are they thinking.....

weird blokes...

I think it's funny that as soon as Apple puts out a face recognition feature, people start applying it to everything other than actual human beings - and then complaining that it doesn't work.

Are you having problems with the feature when used as intended? No? Then proclaim it good. It was pretty clear from the demo that Apple intended the feature to be used on human faces. That's what I would care about.
 
I'm pretty sure you could do this even with iMovie 08. Whenever I plugged in an exernal hard drive It would show up in the browser in iMovie as a spot to save projects to, and i would use. It would create an iMove folder just as it does in your regular movies folder, and would save projects and content to that folder. I can verify that network mounts show up in the browser as well. Please specify if you are trying to save to the machine itself or their network folders (which, if you arent dealing with HD and you have gig-ethernet, you shouldnt have too much of a problem with network drives unless students are doing serious editing or you're worried about space).

foshizzle - when I go into iMovie '08 and choose New project, it only gives me the option to select the aspect ratio - in iMovie '06 you would also at that point be able to choose the folder for the project. If you could tell me how to specify the folder, that would be great. I must be blind because for the life of me I cannot find this option (and our Apple engineer couldn't either - their solution was to set up symbolic links to a local folder). I would like to just save to a local folder that I have already created that the students have access to. Its not a bandwidth issue as we also have gig ethernet - its a space issue. Thanks!
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

iPhoto - One word Impressive. Faces more than probably 70% of the time got it right and improved after tagging more photos.

iWeb - Finally. Multiple sites can be uploaded independently. Did crash however when putting numerous (6~) countdown timers on a single page.
 
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