Apple iLife including iMovie and iDVD

Suggested Retail: $50 (Mac only; pre-installed on new Macs with DVD recorders) apple.com/ilife

Software bundles aren't always what they're cracked up to be, but Apple has something real to offer by lashing together iMovie and iDVD together in the iLife package . Starting in iMovie, you connect your digital camcorder and "capture" video. Your movie clips appear in chart form above a timeline where you can arrange the scenes. There's room on the timeline for a soundtrack, and you can take music straight from CD or from your iTunes library with one click. Once you get the hang of the commands, you can rearrange the course of events so that they better match your funky beat. Mind you, all film-editing programs require you to learn new tools and commands, but Apple's interface makes it easy to master tricky moves quickly. Once you've pieced together your film, you can add special effects and transitions, and Apple has the best: Earthquake, Fairy Dust, Aged Film, and more, plus the new Skywalker Sound Effects.

Building your DVD is also extremely easy: You just save your project, and click Create DVD. Other programs make you convert a movie to a specific video format (like QuickTime or MPEG-2) before going to DVD, but Apple's got it all together. Your project is automatically moved from iMovie to iDVD, where you build a menu. Later, before the DVD is actually burned, the program will do the required, tedious video rendering and conversion. Setting up your DVD menu in iDVD is terrific fun, because there are lots of professional-looking animated title pages to choose from.

Bottom Line: The movie I made with Apple's software suite was the best looking film I've produced so far.