Live the iLife

Amid all the fuss about Apple's new web browser, Safari, launched at last month's MacExpo, not enough was made about the re-launching of the company's "digital hub" applications. iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto and iDVD, now known collectively as iLife, represent the most compelling reasons to use a Mac these days.

The packages aim to make it easier to connect digital devices to your computer, and then do things with what they contain. iTunes manages MP3 music files, while iPhoto will download pictures from your digital camera, enhance and organise them. iMovie is my favourite of the quartet - a package that takes video from a camcorder and makes it easy to edit together films with titles, music and sound effects. It will then export to iDVD which, for those with a DVD-burner in or attached to their machines, lets you make a DVD that will play on most domestic players.

Some components of this package have been around for more than two years now, but the latest incarnation really brings them to a new level of maturity. It is a simple task to drop some of your favourite music from iTunes into your movie, or import a digital photograph from iPhoto and pan across it just like they do in documentaries on real TV. The new menu effects in iDVD are a huge improvement on previous incarnations, and can help give even the most hurried movies a professional-looking veneer.

To understand what immense power has landed on our desktops, and what a liberation we have been delivered, allow me to reminisce about the first time I saw a digital editing suite. It was a little over a decade ago, when such a setup was considered quite exotic.

It was a summer holiday project where a bunch of students, funded by - I suspect - one of those slightly mysterious pots of European money that knock around, got together to create a community TV station for a week, covering one of the Edinburgh festivals.

The project was fraught with difficulty. A major problem was, of course, that few of us had any TV experience. The only student who looked like she knew what she was doing was a young Edith Bowman, now one of the two surviving presenters of RI:SE on Channel 4.

The other difficulty was the technology. We had few cameras, huge analogue things, and most of the EU money had to be spent on wheeling in a digital video expert. The Avid editor sat in front of a fantastically expensive top-of-the-range Mac, between vast arrays of hard disks, and edited together the scraps of usable material we brought back to base. (The "Avid" in his title referred to the software he used to edit the material, rather than his enthusiasm, which I recall waned as the week dragged on.)

Back then, the editing process was slow and expensive - both in capital costs and in experts' time. That put creating credible TV, even watchable TV, out of the reach of most of us - even if we had the means to distribute it.

Yet in the space of a decade, I now have that kind of computing power - much more, in fact - sitting on my desk.

A digital video camera, bought a few years ago with no intention of connecting it to a computer, can plug directly into the back of my iMac, using the built-in FireWire (or iLink DV link, as it might be known) connection. Plugging it in causes the iMac to start up iMovie, the video editing package. And one mouse click later - on the "import" button - and iMovie has taken over control of the camera, and is uploading the raw video on the tape.

The software automatically divides the footage into manageable clips, which you then drag and drop into a timeline. Edit the clips, drop in some sound effects or titles, and a dull hour of holiday footage can be boiled down to 5 minutes of entertainment.

Click on another button and it all gets exported to iDVD where, if you have a Mac with a DVD-burning SuperDrive, you can create a DVD you can play in any standard player. Otherwise, you can create a QuickTime movie to store on your hard disk, or post on the web for all comers to watch whenever they want.

It's amazing technology, at an amazing price. Ten years ago, if we had spent Mr Avid's fee for the week on today's computing hardware, we'd have had enough to buy a few video-editing computers outright, and some smart haircuts and smart clothes for the entire on-screen team. However, we wouldn't have had the pro's expertise in editing had we decided to do the whole thing ourselves.

That festival TV project ended in some confusion when arrangements to get it broadcast collapsed. These days, we'd have looked to the internet to get the programmes aired - and might even have got a modest audience, as broadband take-up increases in Britain's cities.

Instead of the freebee iMovie, professional video editors would probably prefer Apple's (much) more expensive Final Cut Pro software (£829) or, at least, the very full-featured but much cheaper Final Cut Express package (£248.99), also launched last month.

But the quality of the software also suggests desktop video editing need not lead to the kind of aesthetic horrors that desktop publishing introduced us to 15 years ago.

Want to work out how the pros do it? Here's a tip: watch one of those ubiquitous home improvement shows some time, with the volume off. You'll see an array of visual tricks that make things more interesting to watch - and most if not all are available to you through a package like Apple's iMovie. Mimic the pace of the cuts between scenes, the little effects they throw in, and your holiday movies will never look the same again.

Cheap, simple video editing software, and now a cheap, simple means of distribution: it all adds up to something that's well worth making a fuss about.