Media Tools May Just Be the Apple of Users’ Eyes

Hey babe, you look fabulous. Let’s do lunch at the Ivy. My people will call your people.

After six years in L.A., I finally feel like part of “the biz.” Last week, I produced my own DVD movie. To top it off, I cut my own CD.

What caused this sudden transformation from lowly newspaper reporter to aspiring Hollywood player? Apple Computer.

Two software titles introduced at last week’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco make it possible for just about any entertainment industry wannabe to mix his or her own music compilations and produce movies and slide shows on DVD.

As first cousins to the 1-year-old iMovie program for editing digital home videos, iTunes and iDVD are part of Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs’ goal of making the iMac the “digital hub” of “this new digital lifestyle era.”

The big breakthrough is iDVD, which enables folks to burn their iMovie flicks onto a DVD and watch them on a TV. They also can send those DVDs to far-flung family and friends so they can watch in their own DVD-equipped living rooms.

In a sense, iDVD turns DVDs into giant versions of the floppy disks that store text documents and spreadsheets. Apple is aiming to be the first computer maker to offer a drive that both reads and writes CDs and DVDs.

Apple’s new SuperDrive is fast. Thanks to a breakthrough that reduces the amount of time it takes to record a file onto a DVD by a factor of more than 10, a one-hour movie that used to take 25 hours--more than an entire day!--to transfer onto a disc can be burned onto a DVD in only two hours.

The iDVD software employs a template to help users organize movies and photos on a DVD. To import an iMovie (or any other QuickTime video file), just drag and drop the icon onto the iDVD template.

The software automatically uses the video’s file name as its title and the first frame as its thumbnail image. You can change both. To jazz up the title, use the mouse to click on the text and type something new. Clicking on the picture will call up a bar that lets you scroll through the movie frame by frame until you find one you like.

In addition to movies, iDVD lets you store pictures that can be viewed as a slide show. This works for photos taken with a digital camera, for photos taken with a regular camera and scanned into the computer and for individual frames from a video.

At first, I thought the idea of perusing snapshots on a TV set was stupid. Then I considered the alternative: sitting sandwiched between two friends as they squinted to see my 4-by-6-inch paper prints. Suddenly, the prospect of sitting on a sofa and thumbing through photos on a TV screen by pressing buttons on a DVD remote seemed much more appealing.

To create a slide show, click on the Slide Show button at the bottom of the template. Then click on the icon for the empty slide show and begin dragging and dropping photo files into it. Use the mouse to arrange the photos in whatever order you’d like.

Once all the movies and slide shows are in place, it’s time to decorate. The iDVD software comes with 19 templates in a range of solid colors, patterns and themes, from travel to refrigerator magnets. If you’d like, you can create your own background from a photo or other file.

To see how the finished DVD will look, click on the Preview button. Up pops a virtual remote to let you navigate your DVD.

These DVDs can hold about an hour’s worth of video, and the disc-shaped icon at the bottom of the template shows how much time you’ve used. When you’re ready to burn it onto a blank disc, which costs about $10, just click on Burn DVD to commit it to disc.

The biggest drawback with iDVD is that it’s only available bundled with the top-of-the-line Power Mac G4, the only Apple machine that sports the SuperDrive for burning custom DVDs. That G4 won’t be available until February, and it will cost $3,499.

In the meantime, Mac users can amuse themselves with iTunes, a slick jukebox program that became available for free download from Apple’s Web site on the first day of Macworld. For a company that spent most of last year missing the boat on digital music, iTunes represents a strong comeback.

In terms of simplicity and ease of use, iTunes is a generation ahead of Microsoft’s Media Player and MusicMatch’s Jukebox. (RealNetworks doesn’t make a Mac version of its RealJukebox.)

Designed for iMacs and G4s running Apple OS 9.0.4 or higher, iTunes turns your desktop into a music library.

To build that library, Apple recommends copying, or “ripping,” individual songs from CDs you already own and converting them into compressed MP3 files. Just insert a CD into your computer and up pops a list of all the songs on the disc. Click on the songs you want to copy, then click on the Import icon.

On computers running Apple’s forthcoming OS X at the Macworld show, the process was quick and the songs were copied about seven or eight times faster than it takes to play them. Back in Los Angeles, on a G4 running OS 9.0.4, songs copied only three to six times faster.

Apple doesn’t emphasize this, but you also can use Napster or a similar service to find free MP3 files on the Net and include them in your library.

You can build a playlist by clicking on the songs you want to include and using the mouse to arrange them in the desired order. Searching through the library is simple--just type in the name of the song, artist or album you’d like, and the matching titles appear in the iTunes window. Aspiring deejays can make as many playlists as they’d like and store them on iTunes.

Each mix can be played in order or be set on “shuffle” mode. There’s also an option for visualizing songs with a program that produces psychedelic images based on the wave form of the music.

If you want to take your music with you, you can download a playlist to a portable MP3 player. If you have a Power Mac G4 with a CD-RW drive (or an iMac or iBook with an external CD-RW drive), you also can burn your playlist onto a CD.

My guess is that iTunes will become the sort of program that many Mac users will wonder how they ever lived without.

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Times staff writer Karen Kaplan covers Southern California technology companies.