Thoughtful, detailed coverage of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, plus the best-selling Take Control ebooks.

 

iMovie '09: Speed Clips up to 2,000%

iMovie '09 brings back the capability to speed up or slow down clips, which went missing in iMovie '08. Select a clip and bring up the Clip Inspector by double-clicking the clip, clicking the Inspector button on the toolbar, or pressing the I key. Just as with its last appearance in iMovie HD 6, you can move a slider to make the video play back slower or faster (indicated by a turtle or hare icon).

You can also enter a value into the text field to the right of the slider, and this is where things get interesting. You're not limited to the tick mark values on the slider, so you can set the speed to be 118% of normal if you want. The field below that tells you the clip's changed duration.

But you can also exceed the boundaries of the speed slider. Enter any number between 5% and 2000%, then click Done.

Visit iMovie '09 Visual QuickStart Guide

 

 

Recent TidBITS Talk Discussions
 
 

Nisus Writer 6.5 Adds Outlining, Document Manager

Nisus Writer 6.5 Adds Outlining, Document Manager -- Nisus Software joined in the holiday tradition of pushing big releases out just before the end of the year with Nisus Writer 6.5, a significant revision to the company's powerful word processor. The new outlining feature has been requested for several years; it appears to have the necessary basic outlining features, although some use will be required to see how fluid they really are. Also new is a Document Manager that's accessible from a new hierarchical Documents menu, providing fast access to your documents. Other minor changes include a slight modification in how copied paragraphs are pasted, a fix for a crashing bug that occurred when typing more than 32 characters in the Catalog window, and fixed import and export of footnotes, plus a modified Plain Text command that doesn't remove user-defined styles to be compatible with the new outline feature. For a limited time, the upgrade costs $40 for registered users of Nisus Writer (normally $50); the limited time discount also applies to new purchases ($80 versus $100) and competitive upgrades ($55 versus $70). Nisus Writer 6.5 requires a PowerPC-based Mac running Mac OS 8.5 or later (it works under Classic in Mac OS X) with at least 2 MB of available RAM. A 30-day demo is available as a 23.1 MB download. [ACE]

<http://www.nisus.com/Products/NisusWriter/ Upgrade/VersionChanges.asp>
<http://www.nisus.com/Store/DemoNowRedirect.asp? product=NisusWriter6.5>

 

Dragon speech recognition software for Macintosh, iPhone, and iPad!
Get the all-new Dragon Dictate for Mac from Nuance Communications
and experience Simply Smarter Speech Recognition.
Learn more about Dragon Dictate: <http://nuance.com/dragon/mac>