Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Late last week, TUAW ran a story about the Holga iPhone Lens Filter Kit SLFT-IP4, a US$25 case that gives iPhoneographers a wheel of ten fun filters to put in front of their iPhone's camera lens. Now photography toy store Photojojo has something even more fun for the serious iPhone photographer -- the iPhone Lens Dial ($249).

This isn't a low-cost, cheap set of lenses from China. Instead, the Lens Dial is a machined aircraft-grade aluminum case for the iPhone 4 and 4S that features three lenses on a rotating dial. You have your choice of a .33x Fisheye lens, a .7x Wide Angle lens, and a 1.5x Telephoto lens, all made of optical-quality coated glass.

To make sure that your camera is rock-steady while shooting those pro photos, the Lens Dial comes complete with two tripod mounts -- one for portrait orientation, the other for landscape. Besides the hefty price tag of the Lens Dial, there's another cost you'll incur. This is a heavy little accessory, adding 10 ounces of weight to your lightweight (4.9 ounce) iPhone 4S.

Still, the Lens Dial looks a perfect gift for the iPhoneographer on your list. If you have any space on your shopping list, you can buy one for me, too. Please? I really have been good this year.

Photojojo's iPhone Lens Dial a pricey, but cool iPhoneography accessory originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Monday, November 21, 2011

Article: InfoWorld's top 10 emerging enterprise technologies

InfoWorld's top 10 emerging enterprise technologies
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9222042/InfoWorld_s_top_10_emerging_enterprise_technologies?taxonomyName=Network+Security&taxonomyId=142

InfoWorld's top 10 emerging enterprise technologies

Which of today's newest shipping technologies will triumph over the long haul? Here are our best guesses

InfoWorld staff

November 21, 2011 (InfoWorld)

Everyone is a trend watcher. But at a certain point, to determine which trends will actually weave their way into the fabric of business computing, you need to first take a hard look at the technologies that gave life to the latest buzz phrases.

That's the idea behind InfoWorld's top 10 emerging enterprise technologies of 2011. We're every bit as excited as the most vociferous pundit about big changes in the direction of enterprise IT, from the consumerization of IT to infrastructure convergence. But what actual, vapor-free technologies have emerged that enable these big ideas to take shape? That's InfoWorld's stock in trade.

[ Go deep into key business technologies with InfoWorld's series of Deep Dive PDF special reports, including HTML5, private cloud, mobile management, server virtualization, Windows 8, and BI/analytics. | Get the key perspectives, reviews, and news from the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. ]

Among the host of enterprise technologies shipping but not yet widely adopted, we think the following 10 will have the greatest impact. Our selection criteria are subjective rather than objective, derived from many years of evaluating products in the InfoWorld Test Center, observing the ebb and flow of the industry, and taking stock of what appeals to enterprise customers. In other words, this list is based on the collective judgment and experience of InfoWorld editors and contributors, not some magic formula.

Except for the purposes of example, we have for the most part avoided specific product descriptions (visit the InfoWorld Test Center for that). We're focusing on technologies rather than their specific product implementations frozen in time, simply because technology evolves so quickly.

You may not agree with our picks — in fact, given the contentious world of IT, we'd be surprised if you did. So please post your thoughts in our comments section (Add a comment).

10. HTML5 InfoWorld has written a huge amount about HTML5, but we spent some time debating internally whether to include it in this list. The naysayers pointed out that we've been putting tags together to form Web pages since the beginning of the World Wide Web. HTML5 has simply added new tags. Did we stop what we were doing to celebrate when someone invented the <strong> tag?

Others took the practical view that while HTML5 looks similar to old-fashioned HTML, the tasks it accomplishes are dramatically different. The local data storage, the <canvas> tag, and the video tag make it possible to do much more than pour marked-up words and images into a rectangle. Plus, the new HTML5 WebSockets spec defines a new way to conduct full-duplex communication for event-driven Web apps.

In the end, Adobe's decision to end development of mobile Flash tipped the debate. Suddenly an entire corner of the Web that used to deliver video, casual games, and other animated content is back in play. An entire sector of the Web development industry is going to retool as we move to HTML5 from Flash. And that represents a tectonic shift for Web developers. —Peter Wayner

9. Client-side hypervisorsConventional desktop virtualization has faltered for two key reasons: It requires a continuous connection between client and server, and the server itself needs to be beefy to run all those desktop VMs.

A client hypervisor solves both problems. It installs on an ordinary desktop or laptop, leveraging the processing power of the client. And laptop users can take a "business VM" with them containing the OS, apps, and personal configuration settings. That VM is secure and separate from whatever else may be running on that desktop — such as a malware some clueless user accidentally downloaded — and you get all the virtualization management advantages, including VM snapshots, portability, easy recovery, and so on.

Type 2 client-side hypervisors such as VMware Player, VirtualBox, and Parallels Desktop have been in existence for years; they run on top of desktop Windows, Linux, or OS X to provide a container for a guest operating system. Type 1 client-side hypervisors — which run on bare metal and treat every desktop OS as a guest — provide better security and performance. They're also completely transparent to the end user, never a drawback in a technology looking for widespread adoption.

Client hypervisors point to a future where we bring our own computers to work and download or sync our business virtual machines to start the day. Actually, you could use any computer with a compatible client hypervisor, anywhere. The operative word is "future" — Citrix, MokaFive, and Virtual Computer are the only companies so far to release a Type 1 client hypervisor, due in part to the problem Windows has dealt with for years: supplying a sufficient number of drivers to run across a broad array of hardware. However, these companies will be joined next year by Microsoft itself, which plans to include Hyper-V in Windows 8.

Make no mistake, Windows 8 Hyper-V will require 64-bit Intel or AMD hardware. Don't expect bare-metal virtualization from your ARM-based Windows 8 tablet — or any other tablet — anytime soon. Note too that, unlike Citrix, MokaFive, and Virtual Computer, which built their client hypervisors with the express purpose of easing Windows systems management, Microsoft has stated that Windows 8 Hyper-V will be aimed strictly at developers and IT pros.

But hey, we're talking about Microsoft. It won't stop with developers and IT pros. Yes, tablets are making their way into the workplace, but the fact of the matter is that large-scale Windows desktop deployments are not going away, and Microsoft will be under more pressure than ever to make them easier to manage. With more and more employees working outside of the office — or using a stipend to buy their own PCs and bring them to work — the security and manageability of the client-side hypervisor will offer a compelling desktop computing alternative. —Eric Knorr

8. Continuous build toolsThere are two ways for programmers to look at new tools like Jenkins, Hudson, and other "continuous integration" servers, which put all code through a continuous stream of endless tests: The lone cowboy coders shriek with horror at the way that they're shackled to a machine that rides herd over them. The more collaboratively minded among us like the way continuous build tools help us work together for the betterment of the whole.

When a continuous integration server sends you a scolding email about the problems with the code you checked in 10 seconds ago, it doesn't want to ruin your feeling of accomplishment. It's just trying to keep us all moving toward the same goal.

Tools like Hudson or Jenkins aren't new because there have been a number of slick proprietary continuous integration tools for some time. Rational Team Concert, Team City, and Team Foundation Server are just a few of the proprietary tools that are pushing the idea of a team. But the emergence of open source solutions encourages the kind of experimentation and innovation that comes when programmers are given the chance to make their tools better.

There are at least 400 publicly circulated plug-ins for Jenkins and an uncountable number of hacks floating around companies. Many of them integrate with different source code repositories like Git or arrange to build the final code using another language like Python. When the build is finished, a number of plug-ins compete to announce the results with MP3s, Jabber events, or dozens of other signals. Backups, deployment, cloud management, and many uncharacterized plug-ins are ready.

This work is quickly being turned into a service. Cloudbees, for instance, offers a soup-to-nuts cloud of machines that bundles Jenkins with a code repository that feeds directly into a cloud that runs the code. While some cloud companies are just offering raw machines with stripped-down Linux distros, Cloudbees lets you check in your code as it handles everything else in the stack. —Peter Wayner

7. Trust on a chipExperts have long recognized that in order to assure security at the highest application levels, all the layers — including the physical construction of the computing device — need to be verified.

The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) from the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) was the first popularly adopted hardware chip to assure trusted hardware and boot sequences. It was used by many leading companies, including Apple and Microsoft, and it forms the backbone of Microsoft's BitLocker Drive Encryption technology and forthcoming Windows 8 UEFI Secure Boot architecture.

This year, Intel combined the TPM chip and a hardware hypervisor layer to protect boot sequences, memory, and other components. Any software vendor can take advantage of it. McAfee, now an Intel subsidiary, announced its first integration of the new technology with its DeepSafe technology. Expect other vendors and OSes to follow.

The TCG, meanwhile, hasn't been resting on its laurels. Its original TPM chip's latest specification has morphed into providing a hardware-based Next Generation Authentication Token. Essentially, you'll be able to carry your smartcard certificate on the TPM chip, along with other digital certificates. Your device is all you'll ever need, with no need to bring additional cards, dongles, or key fobs.

Hardware trust solutions aren't perfectly secure, as the Princeton memory freeze and electron microscope attacks showed, but they beat software-only protection solutions. The hardware protection schemes will only get better. Soon enough, every computer device you can use will have a hardware/software protection solution running. —Roger A. Grimes

6. JavaScript replacementsYogi Berra once said of a famous restaurant, "No one goes there anymore, it's too crowded." The same is becoming true of JavaScript. The language may be the most commonly executed code on the planet, thanks to its position as the foundation for Web pages. If that's not enough, its dominance may grow stronger if server-based tools like Node.js gain traction.

Yet for all of JavaScript's success, everyone is moving on to the next thing. Some want to build entirely new languages that fix all of the troubles with JavaScript, and others are just finding ways to translate their code into JavaScript so that they can pretend they don't use it.

Translated code is all the rage. Google's Web Toolkit cross-compiles Java into JavaScript, so the developer types only properly typed Java code. It continues to get better, and Google has integrated it directly with its App Engine cloud so that you can deploy to it with one button.

Some of the translations are purely cosmetic. Programmers who write their instructions in CoffeeScript don't need to worry about much of the punctuation that makes JavaScript look a bit too old school. The cross-compiler kindly inserts it before it runs.

Other translations are more ambitious. Google's recently announced Dart, a language that will apparently fix many of the limitations that the development team thinks make JavaScript a pain. There are classes, interfaces, and other useful mechanisms for putting up walls between the code, an essential feature for large software projects. Spelling out the type of data held in a variable is now possible, but it's only optional. The Dart lovers say they eventually want to replace JavaScript, but for the time being they want to get their foothold by providing a way to translate Dart into JavaScript. In other words, they want to replace JavaScript by making JavaScript the core of their plan. —Peter Wayner

5. Distributed storage tieringNAND flash memory — the stuff of which solid-state drives is made — is up to 1,000 times faster than disk storage and many times cheaper than DRAM. Flash memory is the hottest commodity in storage, and it will be even hotter when storage management software catches up with the potential of flash in the data center.

Flash memory's special combination of high speed and low cost makes it an excellent choice for server-side cache, where it replaces pricier DRAM, and the natural choice for tier-one storage in SANs, where it replaces slower disks. With the cost of flash steadily dropping and the capacities of SSDs steadily on the rise, the days of disk drives in servers and SANs appear to be numbered.

The best part: Having flash storage in servers introduces a possibility that simply wasn't practical with disk — namely, managing server-side storage as an extension of the SAN. In essence, server-side flash becomes the top tier in the SAN storage pool, drawing on intelligence within the SAN to store the most frequently accessed or most I/O-intensive data closest to the application. It's like caching, but smarter and more cost-effective.

The huge performance advantages of flash have made automated tiering within the SAN more compelling than ever. All of the leading SAN vendors now offer storage systems that combine solid-state drives, hard disk drives, and software that will dynamically migrate the "hottest" data to the fastest drives in the box. The next step will be to overcome the latency introduced by the distance between SAN and servers. The speed of flash and block-level autotiering software — which operates in chunks as fine as kilobytes or megabytes — will combine to close this last mile.

Unlike traditional caching, which requires duplicating storage resources and flushing writes to the back-end storage, distributed storage tiering promises both higher application performance and lower storage costs. The server owns the data and the bulk of the I/O processing, reducing SAN performance requirements and stretching your SAN dollar.

The price of these benefits is, per usual, increased complexity. We'll learn more about the promise and challenges of distributed storage tiering as EMC's Project Lightning and other vendor initiatives come to light. —Doug Dineley

4. Apache HadoopTwo years ago we picked MapReduce as the top emerging enterprise technology, mainly because it promised something entirely new: analysis of huge quantities of unstructured (or semi-structured) data such as log files and Web clickstreams using commodity hardware and/or public cloud services. Over the past two years, Apache Hadoop, the leading open source implementation of MapReduce, has found its way into products and services offered by Amazon, EMC, IBM, Informatica, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle, and SAP — not to mention scores of startups.

Hadoop breaks new ground by enabling businesses to deploy clusters of commodity servers to crunch through many terabytes of unstructured data — simply to discover interesting patterns to explore, rather than to start with formal business intelligence objectives. But it must be remembered that Hadoop is basically a software framework on top of a distributed file system. Programs must be written to process Hadoop jobs, developers need to understand Hadoop's structure, and data analysts face a learning curve in determining how to use Hadoop effectively.

Early on, tools were developed to make exploiting Hadoop easier for developers. Apache Hive provides SQL programmers with a familiar SQL-like language called HiveQL for ad hoc queries and big data analysis. And Apache Pig offers a high-level language for creating data analysis programs that are parallel in nature, often a requirement for large processing jobs.

IBM was among the first to provide tools on top of Hadoop that let analysts extract value almost right away. Its InfoSphere BigInsights suite includes BigSheets, which enables users to explore data and build processing jobs without writing code, all using a spreadsheetlike interface.

And Hadoop solutions from startups are popping up everywhere. Cloudera, Hortonworks, and MapR combine their own Hadoop distros with enterprise-oriented management tools. Karmasphere Studio is a specialized IDE that allows developers to prototype, develop, debug, and monitor Hadoop jobs, while Karmasphere Analyst is a GUI tool that enables data analysts to generate SQL queries for Hadoop data sets and view the output in charts and graphs. Another startup, Datameer, offers Datameer Analytics Solution, which also sports a spreadsheet-style user interface.

Where will this all lead? As Hadoop solutions proliferate, businesses will have access to unprecedented insight derived from unstructured data — in order to predict the behavior of Web customers, optimize workflows, and with the aid of data visualization tools, discover patterns in everything from medical histories to common search terms. The best thing about the new wave of Hadoop analytics is that we're only beginning to discover where it may lead. —Eric Knorr

3. Advanced synchronizationApple and Microsoft may have wildly different strategies, but they agree on one thing: It's time to say good-bye to single-user environments, where each PC or other device is a separate island from the rest of the user's computing world. In fact, both companies are moving to a cloud-enabled fabric of user activities spread across devices and applications.

In October, Apple's iOS 5 debuted alongside iCloud, a cloud-based syncing service that keeps bookmarks, documents, photos, and "key value" data (such as state information) in sync across a user's iOS devices, Macs, and — to a lesser extent — Windows PCs. Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 8 takes the concept even further, keeping not just data but application state in sync across Windows 8 PCs and tablets and probably Windows Phone smartphones; as you pick up a device, whatever you were working on with any other device is ready for you to continue with your activity.

This new behavior is going to change a lot of how people work on computers, in ways that should give applications dramatically new utility.

Early iCloud users quickly got used to having their documents available on whatever device they happen to have in hand, for example. That allows automatic backup, of course, but it also creates an expectation of being able to work on anything anywhere. Windows 8 goes even further, letting you pick up where you left off in a document or a task.

Imagine a travel management app that handles your expenses, tickets, and itinerary across your devices — no more copying and pasting information from one source to another. You can easily imagine your smartphone being your CPU, syncing to data and other resources at hand, such as network storage, a local keyboard, a local monitor, and nearby network, as well as passing on tasks to tablets and PCs when you move to one of them. That's the kind of seamless mobility we can begin to imagine with these fabric-oriented syncing capabilities in the OS and in apps.

When you work this way, the notion of emailing yourself documents, copying files between computers, and otherwise manually managing your context seems old-fashioned. When you couple that automatic syncing of data and metadata with the fact that context such as location, available input methods, presentation constraints, motion, Internet accessibility, and sensor-driven data, you get true user-centric computing.

The "sync fabric" model of computing has profound implications for apps, security models, and other technology approaches we've all gotten comfortable with. The fabric paradigm may finally do away with the endpoint notion that has bedeviled computer security since the work-at-home and laptop trends began, forcing a better approach to identity management and authentication in a world where the device is a variable, not a constant, as it was in the heyday of the office PC.

Then there's the issue of the user experience and the need for applications and back-end services to adjust as the user moves among the fabric of devices. Context awareness must be built in, so the app adjusts as the user changes devices. Yet that awareness also opens new possibilities for applications that developers are just beginning to imagine.

If that sounds like a science-fiction version of the cloud, it is. But just as many sci-fi fantasies have become real, so too is the notion of a computing fabric that we can tap into and move through. iCloud and Windows 8 are merely the first, early examples. —Galen Gruman

2. Software-defined networksLike ancient coral reefs, data center networks have grown slowly and inexorably over time and calcified. While servers and storage have benefited from software abstractions that support dynamic management, networks have remained hardware-bound and static. Almost a virtue for decades, their resistance to change has now become a major roadblock on the road to cloud computing.

The technology that promises to remove that roadblock is software-defined networking (SDN). SDN drapes a software layer over switch and router hardware that serves as both a centrally managed control plane and a platform for innovation. SDN isn't network virtualization, though network virtualization will certainly be one of its by-products. Rather, SDN is a way to "program the network" — that is, it allows cloud providers and ISVs to build new networking capabilities the rest of us can draw on.

The leading example of SDN today is OpenFlow, but OpenStack's Quantum, Juniper's QFabric, EMC VMware's virtual network APIs, and NEC's ProgrammableFlow also take an SDN approach. In the case of OpenFlow, the network programming layer is an open protocol that is supported by a growing number of network hardware vendors. A key selling point is that OpenFlow requires no changes to the switching hardware, nor does it require that all traffic through the switch be managed through the OpenFlow protocol. It is designed to work within existing network infrastructures.

OpenFlow is the brainchild of university researchers who wanted a way to experiment with new network protocols on large production networks, and first emerged from the lab to overcome networking challenges posed by running enormous big data processing clusters in the public cloud. The next order of business will be solving the problems posed by large-scale virtualization and multitenancy in public and private clouds.

OpenFlow is still emerging, the functionality is currently limited, and it will take more time before the goals are even clearly defined. The consortium behind OpenFlow, the Open Networking Foundation, is less than a year old, but it counts the likes of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Hewlett-Packard, Citrix Systems, Dell, IBM, NEC, and VMware as members. All these companies are betting on software-defined networking to make provisioning and managing networks in tomorrow's data centers and clouds as flexible and dynamic as managing virtual machines in today's virtualization clusters. —Doug Dineley

1. Private cloud orchestrationThe old method of dedicating infrastructure and admins to individual projects is killing us, resulting in underutilized capacity, high administrative overhead, and drawn-out project cycles. One solution is to pool compute, storage, and network resources in a private cloud — and move IT toward more agile and efficient shared architectures.

With a private cloud, IT managers can borrow technologies and architectures pioneered by public cloud providers and apply them to their own data center. These clouds tend to have many moving parts, including virtualization management, metering and chargeback systems, automated configuration, and self-service provisioning.

Currently, these technologies tend to be spread across various products and solutions. But one in particular has gained surprising momentum over the past year. It's an open source project known as OpenStack, which offers a core set of cloud orchestration services: virtual machine management, object storage, and image services.

Billing itself as a "cloud operating system," OpenStack was initially developed by Rackspace and NASA, but plans to spin off the project as a separate foundation were detailed last month. It now claims over 138 participating companies, including AMD, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, F5, HP, Intel, NEC, and a gaggle of cloud startups. According to OpenStack, identity and self-service layers will be included in the next release in 2012. In addition, several vendors are vying to offer commercialized versions of OpenStack, from Citrix (with its Project Olympus) to startup vendors Internap, Nebula, and Piston Cloud Computing.

The best-known OpenStack competitor is Eucalyptus, which is basically a private cloud implementation of Amazon Web Services. The Amazon interoperability runs deep, because the Eucalyptus stack includes a layer that mimics Amazon's API. You can move workloads from Amazon EC2 to Eucalyptus, as long as you don't stumble over a few subtle differences between the two. Eucalyptus also comes in an open source version.

Packages of private cloud tools are appearing at all layers of the stack. Puppet, to take a leading example, is a configuration management framework designed to automate almost any repeatable task in the data center. Puppet can create fresh installs and monitor existing nodes; push out system images, as well as update and reconfigure them; and restart your services — all unattended. Puppet Labs, the developer of Puppet, partners with both Eucalyptus and OpenStack.

It's easy to be cynical about any cluster of technology to which the term "cloud" is applied. But no one questions the benefits of large-scale virtualization or other schemes, such as network convergence, that pool resources for greater economies of scale. These paradigm changes demand new ways of working — and the emerging collection of cloud orchestration software supplies the means. —Eric Knorr

This article, "InfoWorld's top 10 emerging enterprise technologies," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld on Twitter.

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Sunday, November 20, 2011

MacTech offers free Mobile Device Management Primer

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

First, it was a few people who wanted to get work email on their personal iPhones so they could keep up with the office even if they weren't there. Then it was a couple of high level people who decided they'd get iPhones as their official company phone. Now you have stacks of them all over the place and people are starting to ask questions about managing this many devices and security policies and...urgh! What ARE you going to do about all of that?

Instead of the heart attack you're likely considering at the moment, let me make a different suggestion: Check out the new Mobile Device Management Primer from MacTech! First and foremost, this is a FREE resource. Really. Go get it. It's THAT simple. It's written by Russell Poucher, an Apple Certified Trainer and session chair for the upcoming MacTech MDM event.

If the primer isn't enough, or it's just enough to show you all the things that you didn't even realize you should be worried about, MacTech has announced an event called MacTech InDepth: Mobile Device Management. This will take place in San Francisco on December 7th. Total cost is $495 for an entire day of curated knowledge. Even more important than the sessions, you get to hang out with a bunch of other folks who also showed up to learn more about MDM, giving you the chance to attend my favorite part of any conference, the "hallway track." This part is the part no webinar or conference call can duplicate, the part where you get to chat with other people randomly over lunch or between sessions. I have attended conferences and learned at least as much from the hallway track as I have from the tracks themselves!

Whether you get to go to San Francisco or not, you should definitely check out the primer above and spend a little time with it, especially if you are just starting to look at iPhones in your IT environment. It's free! So go get it, and see if you have any free time in early December. I hear San Francisco is almost as lovely then as it is in January...

MacTech offers free Mobile Device Management Primer originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 18 Nov 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This Week's Reading - 20111121

How OS X Lion helps keep your files safe - TechRadar, UK, Autosave and Versions

10 cool iMovie effects to make your videos sparkle | News | TechRadar

The New Metrics for CIO Success - Computerworld

10 things Android does really well | TechRepublic

How OS X Lion helps keep your files safe | News | TechRadar

How to get more work done in Google Docs | How To - CNET

The Job of a CIO - Content verses Context - great post by John H.

Tutorial: How to reinstall Windows but keep your program settings - TechRadar

Tutorial: 10 cool iMovie effects to make your videos sparkle

TechRadar: All latest feeds

Cool iMovie effects: 1-3

With iMovie, Apple created an editing program that's highly versatile – so much so in fact that it was the inspiration for the newlook Final Cut Pro released earlier this year. With iMovie, you can create a short film in minutes, if not seconds (depending on how complex you want it to be) and share it with friends and family over the web.

But this simplicity is just the tip of the iceberg. If you have the time and the inclination, you can create advanced effects and editing styles just like all those Hollywood movies you see at the cinema or rent with iTunes.

Obviously, the one thing that stands in your way is your budget – or lack thereof: you can't hope to replicate the same quality of effect as a major motion picture, but you'd be surprised how close you can actually get. So let's roll up our sleeves and have a look at what you can achieve with a consumer program that comes free with every new Mac, or which can be purchased for only £10.49 from the Mac App Store.

Most of the effects we'll be showing you over the course of this article can be achieved straight from within iMovie, but we'll also give you a few tips on what you can do during the shoot itself to give your clips the best possible chance of looking and sounding their best. That way they'll be ready to dazzle your audience as part of your latest low-budget blockbuster home movie.

1. Working with green or blue screens

You don't need to go to exotic locations – you can do it all from home!

Chroma key

Being able to fly, walk on an alien world or survive a spectacular accident is par for the course in most blockbuster Hollywood movies. But obviously none of it is real – it's all done with smoke and mirrors, or more precisely, chroma keying.

The idea behind the process is that it's easy to cut out a single colour, rendering it transparent and allowing you to put something else in its place. Green or blue are used because both colours are the furthest away from all human skin tones.

One of iMovie's advanced tools is the ability to automatically remove a green or blue background from a clip. But how do you get such a background in the first place?

Low budget

That's where it gets a little complicated, but it's perfectly achievable and the results are very effective, even on a low budget. Then you'll be able to be anywhere in the world. You'll need to get yourself some equipment, none of which is optional if you want the effect to work properly.

The first one is a backdrop. If you already have a green or blue sheet, or even a wall of the appropriate colour, you could experiment with it and see if it works as expected. Otherwise, eBay has a lot of resellers offering affordable chroma key backdrops.

What's more important is the lighting. You need to evenly light your backdrop; then you'll need to light your subject separately. This way, it'll be much easier to find the edges around the subject to avoid a potential halo around it when the backdrop is cut.

Since you're on a budget, you need to find workarounds to expensive modern professional lights. Twin 500W halogen work lights on a tripod will do an excellent job. Get two sets – one for either side of the screen.

Using the same lighting system for your subject would completely wash it out. Getting redheads is probably your best bet as it's not the most recent technology, so you can get them cheaper. Again: eBay. Make sure you get at least two to light your subject evenly.

redheads

Lastly, you need to make sure your camera will remain static for the whole duration of the shoot, so either place it on a shelf or stool, or invest in a tripod. Since the purpose is to keep the camera motionless, the most basic tripod will do. You won't be able to do tracking shots or follow the subject as they walk around; you'd have to match the movement with the background exactly and this can only be done with motion-tracking cameras.

Light placing

Next, you'll have to experiment to make sure the lighting is in the right place for the effect to work, and then import the footage into iMovie.

Then you need to make sure the program's Advanced Tools are turned on (done from the Preferences window). Then, add your backdrop onto your project and drag your green/blue screen clip on top of it.

Select the appropriate pop-up option and the background clip should appear behind your subject.

2. Get a dolly zoom effect

This effect is usually done during the shoot but can be recreated in iMovie

contra zoom

The dolly zoom effect is very recognisable: the subject in the foreground stays motionless, but the background appears to change and zoom out so you can see more of it.

To achieve this, you need to move the camera back as you zoom into your subject. The speed of the trackback and the zooming in must be the same for the subject's size to remain the same. The effect works very well, but is very difficult to replicate with a consumer camera since the zoom controls on such devices are far from precise.

You can, however, cheat the whole thing by using a green screen backdrop. You don't even need to zoom out of your background clip while you're shooting: all of it can be done from within iMovie. Just make sure both the background and the subject were shot using a static camera – ideally on a tripod.

You could also use a photograph for the background if you prefer, since images are usually taken at resolutions that are much higher than high-definition video, eliminating the possibility of pixellating the backdrop if you zoom into it too much.

How to create a dolly zoom effect

1. Get Advanced

step 1

In order to work with a blue or green screen clip you need to turn on the Advanced Tools. Go to iMovie > Preferences (or use the Command + , keyboard shortcut).

Make sure the General tab is selected (first on the left) and tick the Show Advanced Tools box to give you more editing and organising options.

2. Stack up your clips

step 2

Choose your backdrop from an event or from your photo library, and add it to your project. Next, find your subject and drag it over the backdrop. You'll be given a series of options. Select either Green Screen or Blue Screen – depending, of course, on the colour of your backdrop.3. Apply Ken Burns

step 3

Select the backdrop clip (to give it a yellow highlight around it), then click on the Crop tool in the tool bar (or simply hit the c key on your keyboard). This tool offers you three choices at the top-left of the main preview window: Fit, Crop and Ken Burns. Make sure the latter is selected.

4. Zoom Out

step 4

Now you should see two rectangles, one green and one red. Make sure the green one (your starting frame) is smaller and inside the red one (the clip's last frame). This will give viewers the illusion of the background zooming out over time. Now click the play button to preview it.

5. Fine-tune the Look

step 5

Click Done to set the effect. Be sure to check what it looks like with your subject over it. The effect may work best if either the top or bottom of the frame stays the same (right where the green and red rectangles meet) so go back and tweak your zoom until you're happy with the result.

6. Zoom In

step 6

You may also find that zooming in on your subject over time can improve the effect. You can apply a Ken Burns effect to your chroma keyed clip too, only make the change more subtle and make sure the end frame is smaller than the start frame. Your dolly zoom effect should then be complete.

3. The steadycam effect

Stabilise your shots to smooth the motion for that professional touch

The Shining is probably the best example of the use of steadycams, as the camera glides through the hotel's corridors and its maze.

Usually, to get a steady moving shot, you'd put your camera on a dolly – essentially a set of tracks – but there's obviously huge limitations to this technique: one is that you mustn't show the ground otherwise you reveal the tracks; another is the difficulty in going up or down stairs.

With a steadycam, you can follow your subject wherever they may go. Proper steadycams cost an absolute fortune, but the Smoothee for iPhone is relatively cheap at £170 and if you're a handy DIY person, Johnny Chung Lee very kindly posted an article on how to build your very own steadycam for little more than US$14 (£9) in parts. The instructions are at www.littlegreatideas.com/stabilizer/diy.

Using a steadycam requires quite a bit of practice, but once you've perfected your moves, you can create incredibly smooth motion as you walk, no matter what you follow. Sadly, not all of us are handy with a screwdriver and until the cheapest steadycam in the world becomes available for sale you may have to do your best.

But Apple hasn't left you high and dry: iMovie has a tool for stabilising your clip's motion. It can't work miracles and an overly shaky shot won't be fixed (instead, you'll see a red squiggly line over the problem segments in its Event), but it can be highly effective on most clips.

How to smooth out those shaky shots

1. Analyse in an Event

step 1

You can analyse your clips even before you add them to a project. To do this, select a clip (or multiple ones) and open the Inspector by clicking on the toolbar's 'i' button. Make sure that window's Clip tab is selected and click on Analyse Entire Clip. The process may take a while.

2. Choose the right part

step 2

By default, an analysed clip will have its motion smoothed automatically as soon as you insert it into your project – as long as you don't select any part of the clip that had those red squiggly lines. If you do, the stabilisation process will not occur, so make sure you only add a section that will work.

3. Stabilisation control

step 3

Play that clip back and you should see an improvement over the original. Unlike the green screen effect, you have some control over the process: double-click the clip to open the Inspector. The stabilisation section has a slider. Drag it to the left to lower the amount of stabilisation applied to your clip.

Cool iMovie effects: 4-6

4. Use external microphones

If your movie sounds great it will make your screen images look even better

There's one element that makes it obvious you're watching an amateur movie as opposed to a professional one: the audio. Although nearly all camcorders or video recording devices capture sound as well as images, the quality is often very poor. Even HD camcorders that produce vibrant, high-quality clips are often let down by the low quality of the on-board mic.

It's a well-known fact that audio is crucial to the appreciation of your film. Poor sound makes your audience feel that the video was actually of poorer quality than it actually is. Good-quality audio enhances the whole experience. So get yourself a device whose sole purpose is recording sound and you will greatly increase your production value for very little money indeed.

Small recorder

Take the Samson Zoom H1, for instance. It's a tiny audio recording device that records very high-quality sound in stereo. You can choose various formats, but since we're going for quality, you should select an uncompressed one: WAV. This means that the files will take up more space, but this is a small price to pay for higher quality.

If you're going to go for this device (which is available via www.amazon.co.uk) make sure you also budget for its Accessory Pack, which includes a tripod and a windscreen foam cover, designed to cut out unwanted sound (which often gets captured, especially when shooting outdoors). In total, this should cost you something in the region of £100.

If your camcorder is capable of taking in audio input – with a line in stereo jack, for instance – then you could connect it to your microphone. That way you wouldn't have to worry about syncing the sound with the video later on in the editing process. But having an external mic can offer you advantages that those tethered to the camera cannot match: you could have a long shot and still hear the people you're recording perfectly because the mic is hidden near them and a long cable would be hard to conceal from view.

So if you've got your audio and video on separate files on your Mac, how do you go about connecting them together? This can be a little difficult to achieve in iMovie but it can work.

First of all, you need a clear point of reference to achieve the sync. This is where clapperboards come in, but why purchase one when a couple of hands clapping will work just as well? As long as your clap can be seen on screen and heard on the audio track, then you can add a marker on your project when the clap happens (markers are one of iMovie's many hidden advanced tools that you can reveal from the Preferences window).

Toggle the waveforms for your audio tracks to see the spike that represents the clap, and move it until that spike is under the marker. Mute the original audio and play your footage back. Drag the audio left or right until the sync is perfect. Once you've achieved this, you might not use your camcorder's built-in microphone ever again.

5. Working with effects

Change a clip's look progressively over time using iMovie's built-in effects

effects

Modern camcorders can automatically focus, white balance and colour correct for you. As such, most of your clips will look fine and be ready to be included into a project the moment you import them. But machines being what they are, they do sometimes get it wrong, which is why iMovie's various video tools can come in so handy.

With them, you can alter the brightness, contrast and colour of any shot. You can obviously use them to also distort the image, giving it an unnatural appearance to simulate unusual weather conditions or to create that alien planet feel you were after.

Couple those changes with one of iMovie's 19 video filters and you have a broad palette to play with (you can also copy and paste those changes from one clip to others by using the Edit > Paste Adjustments commands in the menu bar; these can save you a lot of time if you want to create a special visual style for a large part of your project).

Unlike Final Cut Pro and other professional editing packages, there isn't an obvious way to gradually apply that change over time – it's a black and white clip, or it's a colour one, for instance; there's no in-between.

So what do you do if you want to play around with your image and slowly intensify the colour – like the effect in Limitless when a mind-enhancing tablet is taken? Thankfully, such an effect isn't out of the reach of iMovie. All you have to do is cut the clip in the right place, as shown below.

How to alter a clip progressively over time

1. Find and cut

step 1

Find the clip you want to alter over time and add it to your project. Skim over it with the mouse until you're over the part you'd like the change to occur. Without moving the cursor, press the Shift+Command+S keys to activate the Split Clip tool, which cuts the clip into two at that very point.

2. All change

step 2

Double-click on one part of the clip to bring up the Inspector window. Select the Video tab and make your changes. You can also make use of the Video Effect menu in the Inspector's Clip tab to add a single effect to your clip (only one can be used at a time). You can alter your modifications at any time.

03. Transition

step 3

Go to Window > Transitions to reveal the Transitions panel, bottom-right of the interface (or use the Command+4 keyboard shortcut). Locate Cross Dissolve and drag it onto the gap between the clips. To change its length, double-click on it in your project and type in a new value in the Duration field.

6. Create cutaway shots

Cut to another shot without ever losing the focus of your story

tip 6 main

Look at any movie or television show, from any period, and you'll see that the editing never stays on the same shot for too long. In fact, you may feel that some do overstay their welcome and you long for the camera to let you see something else.

Changing shots doesn't mean changing scenes: when done right, cutting to different angles keeps the story interesting and the pace flowing. It also makes it easier to use a different take that had a better reaction. You can use it to cut to the scenery that is being described in the current shot, while still hearing the narrator talk about the location.

The official term for this is creating cutaways. As we saw earlier, although iMovie appears to only handle a single layer of video (meaning you can't stack clips on top of each other, as you can with Final Cut Pro for instance) there is support for an additional layer when the need arises, and when the Advanced Tools have been turned on.

Just like you could with the split screen effect, you can add a clip on top of another, but instead of seeing both at the same time, it's a straight cut: the clip above completely replaces the one below for its duration.

Why would you do this instead of cutting the clip and inserting the other in between? For flexibility: that way you can move the cutaway clip over the narrating one until you find the perfect spot. Also, the narrating clip's audio track is uninterrupted so you can see a shot and listen to another clip's audio at the same time.

How to create a cutaway effect

1. Make a cutaway

step 1

With iMovie's Advanced Tools turned on in the Preferences window, select a shot from one of your Events and drag it over a clip in your chosen project. A contextual menu will appear. Select Cutaway and the clip will be placed above the original, on a second layer.

2. Move and alter

step 2

As you drag the cutaway along, a shadow will appear on the clip beneath it to give you an idea of which part will be obstructed. Move the cursor to either one of the cutaway's edges to turn it into a resize tool. You can drag the edges inward or outward to decrease or increase duration.

3. Fades and opacity

step 3

Double-click on the cutaway to open the Inspector window. The middle section offers you a couple of options specifically for that type of clip: you can choose to add a cross-fade transition which will appear both at its start and end; or alter the opacity to see part of the lower clip through it.

Cool iMovie effects: 7-10

7. Perform a split edit

You can cut video to another shot, but how do you let audio carry on?

step 7 main

When you cut a clip and insert another in iMovie, its audio is cut at the same time. But if you watch any movie, you'll notice that this isn't what usually happens: a scene between two people takes place, the action cuts between a shot of one to another before the first person has finished speaking, yet you can still hear them. This is known as a split edit.

It is used extensively throughout the industry and is a great way to improve a shot. It offers immense flexibility since you get to use the audio that works best for your current situation.

Split edits are obviously easy to achieve with professional editing suites, but how would you manage with a consumer-level program? If you were working with the original iMovie, you'd be out of luck. Even with a version as recent as the one released in 2009, you'd have to create complicated workarounds like detaching the audio and extending it, leading to potential disaster should that audio track move out of sync with the video it came from.

That option is still available in iMovie '11, but thankfully, the latest version also introduced many very powerful audio features (some of which had been missing since iMovie 6 HD). These include being able to see a clip's audio waveforms, alter just a segment of it and even see at a glance which part could be peaking and lead to distorted sound, making it easier to fix, or cut out of your project. Another addition is the split edit and we'll show you how it's a lot easier to achieve than it appears.

How to create a split edit effect

1. The Precision Editor

step 1

Find a clip in your project whose audio you'd like to extend and mouse over its thumbnail. You'll see a button appear lower left of it. Click on it and select the first option: Precision Editor. The lower part of the interface is replaced with a more zoomed-in version of your clips and their edit points.

2. See waveforms

step 2

By default, you'll only see the video clip. Just like the project section, you can zoom in or out of it with the slider, bottom-right of the section. If you want to see the clip's audio track, you need to click on the Show Audio Waveform button, top-right of the interface.

3. Create the split edit

step 3

Move the cursor to the edit point's blue line and make sure it's over the audio waveform, not the video. Now drag to the right to extend the audio but leave the video exactly where it was. You can do the same for the clip beneath it so you don't hear two audio tracks at the same time.

8. Split the screen in a clip

Create the effect for more than one image on the screen at the same time

Generally, the screen is the viewer's window into the film's world and it behaves like human eyes: you see one image at a time. But film can be a lot more flexible than that. You can in fact be more creative and see more than one image at the same time, each battling for your attention or complementing each other.

The most traditional reason to have two images side by side is for telephone conversations so you can see both people talking and more crucially, their reaction to what they're hearing. But you can also work with a smaller image, tucked away in the corner of the screen to create an observer of the larger action, for instance. You could also find a creative way to make both images interact with one another.

iMovie's interface appears to be designed to only handle a single layer of video and you can only put one clip before or after another. But it is possible to create both of the effects described above without you having to purchase a more expensive application – although you'll have to make sure the Advanced Tools are turned on (they aren't by default).

How to create the split screen effect

1. Picture in Picture

step 1

Drag a clip from an Event onto one already in your project (it doesn't matter which since you can move it around later). With your Advanced Tools switched on, a large menu will pop up. Select Picture in Picture from the contextual menu and your new clip will appear above the current one.

2. Move and resize

step 2

Check the preview section and you should now see a smaller clip top-right of the main image. You can actually move it around to wherever you please with a simple click and drag. Also, if you drag one of its corners, you can resize the smaller picture until it's the dimension you're after.

3. Inspector options

step 3

Double-click it to open the Inspector. From there, you can add a border around your smaller clip with a limited choice of thickness and colours. You can also turn the shadow on and off by clicking the appropriate tick box. The PIP Effect section offers you three ways to make the clip appear on screen.

4. Side by Side

step 4

You could alter the smaller clip until it's the same size as the one beneath it, but you can't place it side by side. To do this, you need to use a different tool. Drag another clip from an Event onto one in your project. This time you should choose Side by Side from the contextual menu.

5. More Inspector options

step 5

Double-click on the new clip to open the Inspector window. The options you're looking for are in the Side by Side section. You can choose which side of the image it will be placed, and whether you'd like it to slide into view instead of just appearing out of nowhere.

6. Cropping makes perfect

step 6

iMovie cuts your clip in half for you, focusing on the middle of the image. This may not be ideal; so if you do need the effect to preserve another part of the video, you have to use the Crop tool and experiment with the best section to use (you may also find a Ken Burns effect useful too).

9. Create a movie trailer

Announce your forthcoming film in style using iMovie's trailer factory

step 1

Once you've created a short film and put all your hard work into it, you need to build anticipation for your family blockbuster. After all, it's a very well ingrained tradition to create one (or more) trailers to lead the way for your film… although no one's ever truly explained why they're called trailers – aren't trailers supposed to trail, not lead?

In any case, creating a trailer is an art in itself. You have to: pick the right music; select the appropriate clips; and not show too much otherwise there's no reason to see the actual movie, but reveal enough to make people look forward to it and get excited about the story.

You'll be pleased to know that you don't actually need to think too much about this: iMovie '11 comes with its own trailer-making factory: just add the clips in place, type in some information and you're good to go.

A lot of the technology behind trailer creation in iMovie centres on the program's ability to recognise if and how many people are in each shot. Without this facility, making such projects wouldn't be as fun, or as fast – as you'll see…

How to put together a movie trailer

1. Trailer selection

step 1

Start by creating a new project: use the Command+n keyboard shortcut. Scroll down past the usual project themes to the Movie Trailers section. You can choose from one of 15 different types. If you're not sure which one to go for, click on it and see a sample, complete with theme music.

2. Type in the details

step 2

The project area takes on an entirely new look and presents you with an outline of your trailer. Fill in all the information requested. The logo style is a choice of five recognisable Hollywood production studios – but don't try using that studio's actual name: iMovie won't let you.

3. Storyboard titles

step 3

Switch to the Storyboard section (the middle tab) where you'll see the building blocks of your movie, along with placeholder images and generic titles. Click on those titles to customise them (skim through them to see what they'll look like in the preview section; they are played in real time).

4. The Keyword panel

step 4

The Advanced Tools have to be turned on for this next step. In order to fill in those placeholder clips quickly, go to Window > Show Keyword Filter to open a panel to the left of the Event thumbnails. If no keywords are present, you'll also need to select your clips and go to File > Analyse Video > People.

5. Filter to fill

step 5

You'll see filters for Wide, Medium and Close-up shots, along with others with one, two or more people in the frame. Click on one of those filters to see all the clips matching that category. You can then drag the appropriate clip onto the right placeholder in your storyboard.

6. The Shot List

step 6

If you're getting lost, go to the Shot List tab. All the clips you need to find are there, listed by time. You can fill them up really fast: select the first one, then click on a clip to replace the placeholder instantly. The next placeholder is automatically selected. Repeat the process until none are left.

10. Cut in time to music

Create an effective montage or opening sequence in time to the music

music

Music is an essential part of any movie, as it helps set the mood for a scene. An opening sequence would be a lot less interesting and montages would just be a bland assortment of clips without any musical score to underpin them. Who can forget Soylent Green's musical opening montage, or the soundtrack that introduces Rocky?

Like these, the best examples of such sequences are those that are designed to work in time to the accompanying audio track. Trying to replicate such segments may be simple with a high-end video editing programme, but there's no obvious way to achieve this with iMovie; unless of course you reveal the audio's waveform in your project and manually trim each clip you're adding to match a particular peak, which would be an incredibly time-consuming and frustrating exercise.

Thankfully, hidden inside the Clip Trimmer is a way of doing this effortlessly. You'll see that anybody now has the means of editing any sequence in time to any musical track of their choosing. It really is only a matter of hitting the right key just at the right time.

How to cut your video to music

1. Music selection

step 1

Start with a brand new project. Go to Window > Music and Sound Effects to bring up the section, bottom-right of the interface. Find a song you'd like to use and drag it onto the empty project. All you'll see is a small green square with a cog wheel button. Click on that button and choose Clip Trimmer.

2. The musical note

step 2

The Clip Trimmer will appear in the area where your Events usually show; it displays the entire song's waveform over multiple lines. Top-right of the section is a series of icons. You can drag the musical note over your track to place a marker if you like, but that's not a very efficient method.

3. Add markers

step 3

Instead, start playing your song and each time you wish to add a marker (a point where you'll want to cut to another clip in time to the music), hit the m key. Don't worry if you're not very accurate: you can drag those white markers around until their position is perfect. Once finished, click Done.

4. Snap to Beat

step 4

Before you start editing your sequence, there's one more setting you need to turn on: iMovie needs to realise that those markers are important (it will curiously ignore them by default). In order to do this, make sure View > Snap to Beat has a tick next to it. If it hasn't, click on it to activate that feature.

5. Add clips

step 5

Your project doesn't look any different, but that's all about to change: choose a clip but don't worry about your selection's duration – just make sure it starts where you want it then drag it over your project: it'll be cut as soon as it reaches the first marker. Add more clips to build your edit.

6. Mute 'em

step 6

A sequence built in time to music often works best when no other audio can be heard, but montages involve many clips and it would be time consuming to mute each one individually. Thankfully, there's a faster way: Go to Edit > Select All, then Clip > Mute Clips to do it all in one go.

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