iMovie 3.0.3 Improves Performance, Finally -- Shortly after releasing QuickTime 6.3 last week (details later in this issue), Apple also made iMovie 3.0.3 available as a free update. As iMovie is built on QuickTime technology, one of its main improvements is better audio and video synchronization when exporting movies to QuickTime format. iMovie 3.0.3 also feels significantly more responsive, a welcome change, and now includes an option to enable or disable the Ken Burns Effect; previously, the pan-and-zoom effect was applied to all still pictures imported into iMovie. Only hinted at in Apple's description of the update is the capability to crop photos using the Ken Burns Effect: Option-click the Finish radio button to apply the same zoom setting as the Start state. (This also avoids an annoying glitch where still photos would experience pixel shifts if the Start and Finish states were slightly different.) Another welcome change is a preference option for specifying that new projects be set to NTSC or PAL format. Although this update doesn't fix all outstanding issues with iMovie 3 - for example, users still report frequent crashes - iMovie 3.0.3 represents significant improvement. The updater is a 12.1 MB download; a full installer is also available as an 82.3 MB download. iMovie 3.0.3 requires Mac OS X 10.1.5 or later and QuickTime 6.3; 256 MB or more of RAM is recommended. [JLC]

<http://www.apple.com/imovie/>
<http://www.apple.com/imovie/download/>