With the release of Aperture 3.3, Apple ties its professional photo organizer and editor more closely with iPhoto ’11 via a new unified library. You can now access the same images in both Aperture and iPhoto without having to import and export photos manually, and the two apps share Faces, Places, slideshows, and albums. Aperture 3.3 is also optimized for the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display (see “New MacBook Pro Features Retina Display, Flash Memory,” 11 June 2012). The update also brings a number of new features, including support for AVCHD video, Skin Tone and Natural Gray modes added to the White Balance tool, an improved Highlights & Shadows tool, and an Auto Enhance button added to the Adjustments panel. The user interface has been tweaked, adding a new manual option to customize the sort order in the Projects view via drag-and-drop; displaying Facebook, Flickr, and MobileMe albums as thumbnails when accounts are selected in the source list; and modifying some terminology (“Original” instead of “Master” and “Info” instead of “Metadata”). Note that Aperture 3.3 now requires Mac OS X 10.7.4 — these changes aren’t available to users running 10.6 Snow Leopard. ($79.99 new in the Mac App Store, free update, 528 MB)
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.
Written by
Jeff Carlson
Related Articles
- Aperture 3.3.1 (28 Jun 12)
- iPhoto ’11 9.3 (12 Jun 12)
- New MacBook Pro Features Retina Display, Flash Memory (11 Jun 12)
Aperture 3.3
READERS LIKE YOU! Support TidBITS by becoming a member today!Check out the perks at <http://tidbits.com/member_benefits.html>
Special thanks to David C Black, Phyllis Dull, Donald, and Jennifer
for their generous support!

