Chapter 5: Working with Multimedia and the Digital Hub

Overview

With the return of Steve Jobs to Apple a few years ago, the Macintosh experience has changed in dramatic ways. Chief among these changes is the Mac’s role as the “Digital Hub.” The idea behind the Digital Hub is that your Mac serves as the centerpiece of your digital world. You can connect still and video cameras, music devices such as the iPod, and

CD and DVD burners to your Mac, the Digital Hub. The Mac OS takes care of coordinating tasks between these different devices, interpreting the media that each uses and producing useful output.

To help you along in your pursuit of digital nirvana, Apple saw fit to provide Mac users with a suite of digital media applications that offer professional results with a beginner’s learning curve. This suite consists of iTunes for your music, iPhoto for your photographs, iMovie for working with video content, and iDVD for creating DVDs that play in home and computer DVD players.

Not only do the Digital Hub applications work great alone, but they also work well together. Apple has gone to great lengths to make the applications interoperate. The result is that your media tasks are easier to perform, take less time, and give you better results. With the Digital Hub, you can combine multimedia from audio, photo, and video sources into professional-looking presentations that you can then burn onto CD and DVD.