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
 
 

Now Menus Reincarnated as Action Menus

Now Menus Reincarnated as Action Menus -- Power On Software has released Action Menus 1.0, a new component of the company's Action Utilities control panel that provides functionality equivalent to the defunct Now Menus (see "Living in the Now - Now Utilities 5.0, Newer and Better" in TidBITS-248 and "Now Utilities Turns 6-Point-Something" in TidBITS-345). Action Menus makes the Apple menu hierarchical, like Apple Menu Options, and you can flexibly rearrange items within the Apple menu. In the Applications menu, each application hierarchically displays its current windows and recently opened documents. You can also create additional custom menus that show recently used applications (with their recent documents hierarchically attached), recent documents, recent folders (hierarchical), the frontmost application's windows and recent documents, current volumes and servers (hierarchical). Custom menus accept drag & drop of Finder icons: drag into a menu to add an item to the menu, drag into a folder to move or copy an item to that folder, and drag onto an application to open the item with that application. Custom menus can open, quit, or get info on multiple items simultaneously; they can open either an item or its containing folder. You can also modify keyboard shortcuts for all menu items on the fly. Unfortunately, Action Menus does not provide a desktop pop-up menu and is incompatible with Kensington MouseWorks' desktop pop-up menu option. Action Menus requires a color-capable Mac and System 7.5.3 or later; it's available as a 30-day demo (2.2 MB download) or for online purchase at $30. [MAN]

<http://www.poweronsw.com/site2/html/products/ am.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/01792>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/00875>

 

Get more productive with software from Smile: PDFpen for
editing PDFs; TextExpander for saving time and keystrokes while you
type; DiscLabel for designing CD/DVD labels and inserts. Free demos,
fast and friendly customer support. <http://www.smilesoftware.com/>