There was a time when your photographs were in one part of your house; your music collection somewhere else; VHS videotapes scattered around the television; and, if you have a camcorder, Hi-8 (or some such format) cassettes in a box. Each medium was tricky to keep organized.

But when all your media is digital—in the form of digital snapshots, digital audio (CDs, MP3s, and so on), and digital video (DVDs and DV cassettes)—keeping them organized is pretty easy, sharing content is streamlined, and using the material interchangeably between formats is both simple and kind of fun.

A Macintosh is designed to sit at the heart of your digital home. It’s just a computer, but now it’s finely tuned to make managing and combining all this content effortless. Better than that, Apple provides—free on all Macs—software that orchestrates the commingling of all this content. iLife is a family of products made up of applications designed to stand alone but also tuned to work together in remarkable ways.

What iLife teaches you is media literacy: the ability to communicate in a variety of powerful ways, different from speaking or writing or even doing page design. Making professional-quality videos, podcasts, and websites, and being able to combine picture and sound effectively, is a skill that can be applied throughout your life. Once you have it, you’ll be stunned by how often you use it, whether for personal pleasure or commercial advantage.

It’s too simplistic to say that iPhoto is the picture software and iMovie is the video software. iPhoto handles the organization of your pictures, true, but once your images are there, using them in slideshows and videos and on the web is very easy. You can’t build a box around each component of iLife. So rather than focus on each product in turn, this book helps you create real-world projects, which sometimes involves dipping into several applications in a single lesson. Face it, learning software is seldom fun. But making movies or podcasts, promoting your business, or building a creative report for school can be. You’ll end up learning the software along the way.

This book moves through lessons by progressively increasing the complexity of the media you’re using. You start by managing still images alone, then move to publishing still images, turning still images into moving (dynamic) images, and exploring the possibilities of video. With digital content and the five core iLife applications (iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, Garageband, and iDVD), you can create everything from photobooks to DVDs, podcasts, dynamic websites, and polished movies.

Above all, these lessons are meant to be practical—not esoteric projects to show off the software, but real-life projects for real-life people with time constraints, well-worn equipment, and concerns about budget. The lessons cover four general areas: still images, movies, music, and publishing.

Often, training materials are professionally created—using actors and complicated productions with multiple cameras, lights, microphones, tripods, and a crew. The resulting material is of high quality but bears little similarity to the kind of projects you will be working on.

To make this training as real-world and practical as possible, virtually all the media used in this book was made in precisely the way you would make your own videos. With the exception of the American Diabetes Association’s Tour de Cure footage (which was shot professionally), the quality of the shots (for better or worse) is comparable to what you can get with typical consumer equipment, and the sophistication of the projects is precisely what you can achieve using the iLife tools, with settings (and challenges) you will commonly encounter yourself.

We tried to make sure the events depicted here were recorded in the way you are being taught to work. Ideally, this will give you clear and realistic expectations about what you can do with your newfound skills.

This book is written for iLife ’08, which comes free with any new Macintosh computer. If you have an older version of iLife, you will need to upgrade to the current iLife version to follow along with every lesson. The upgrade can be purchased online at www.apple.com and is available from any store that sells Apple software.

Before you begin the lessons in this book, you should have a working knowledge of your Mac and its operating system. You don’t need to be an expert, but you do need to know how to use the mouse and standard menus and commands, and how to open, save, and close files. You should have a working understanding of how OS X helps organize files on your computer, and you should also be comfortable opening applications (from the Dock or at least the Applications folder). If you need to review any of these techniques, see the printed or online documentation that came with your computer.

For a list of the minimum system requirements for iLife, please refer to the Apple website at: www.apple.com/ilife/systemrequirements.html.

The Apple Training Series: iLife ’08 DVD-ROM includes folders containing the lesson files used in this course. Each lesson has its own folder, and you should copy these folders to your hard drive to use the files for the lessons. Note that several lessons use the files from a previous lesson; in those cases, the lesson folder contains a simple text file indicating there are no new media files for that lesson.

Apple Training Series: iLife ’08 is part of the official training series for Apple applications, developed by experts in the field and certified by Apple, Inc. The lessons are designed to let you learn at your own pace. Although each lesson provides step-by-step instructions for creating specific projects, there’s room for exploration and experimentation. However, if you follow the book from start to finish, or at least complete the lessons in each section consecutively, you will build on what you learned in previous lessons.

For those who prefer to learn in an instructor-led setting, Apple also offers training courses at Apple Authorized Training Centers worldwide in Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, and Apple’s Pro applications. These courses are taught by Apple Certified Trainers, and balance concepts and lectures with hands-on labs and exercises. Apple Authorized Training Centers have been carefully selected and have met Apple’s highest standards in all areas, including facilities, instructors, course delivery, and infrastructure. The goal of the program is to offer Apple customers, from beginners to the most seasoned professionals, the highest-quality training experience.

To learn more about Apple Training and Certification, or to find an Authorized Training Center near you, go to www.apple.com/training.

Apple Training Series: iLife ’08 is not intended to be a comprehensive reference manual, nor does it replace the documentation that comes with the applications. Rather, the book is designed to be used in conjunction with other comprehensive reference guides. These resources include: