Apple's free iMovie software made history by tearing down the barriers to pro-quality filmmaking. In version 3, iMovie offers powerful audio enhancements, slick new photo effects, and integration with iTunes and iPhoto-- but it still comes without a single page of printed instructions.
In this funny, authoritative, updated guide, award-winning author David Pogue provides a complete course in Macintosh filmmaking. The book includes:
Essentials of film technique. Using iMovie without a grounding in film technique is like getting a map before you've learned to drive. This book offers a friendly guide to making even home movies look professional.
Editing basics. Part 2 of this book bursts with clever workarounds, hidden features, and editing tricks from the Hollywood film world.
Finding an audience. You can export your finished masterpiece back to the tape for high-quality TV playback-- or save it as a QuickTime movie that you can post on a Web page, email to friends, or burn as a Video CD.
Mastering DVDs. If your Mac has a SuperDrive, you can distribute your movies at much higher quality than VHS tapes or QuickTime movies-- by creating your own Hollywood-style DVDs. Four all-new chapters cover iDVD 3 in detail, including dozens of undocumented secrets for extending the program's design tools.
Whether you plan to make the next Blair Witch Project or just better home movies, iMovie 3 & iDVD: The Missing Manual lets you marry the stunning quality of digital video with the power of your imagination.
David Pogue, Yale '85, is the personal-technology columnist for the New York Times. With nearly 3 million books in print, he is also one of the world's bestselling how-to authors, having written or co-written seven books in the "for Dummies" series (including Macs, Magic, Opera, and Classical Music), along with several computer-humor books and a technothriller, "Hard Drive" (a New York Times "notable book of the year"). Pogue is also the creator and primary author of the Missing Manual series of complete, funny computer books, a joint venture with O'Reilly & Associates. Titles in the series include Mac OS X, Windows XP, iPod, Microsoft Office, iPhoto, Dreamweaver, iMovie 2, and many others. His Web page is www.davidpogue.com, and his email address is david@pogueman.com.
Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. This book was written and edited in Microsoft Word X on various Macs. The desktop-software screenshots were captured with Ambrosia Software's Snapz Pro X (www.ambrosiasw.com) for the Mac. Adobe Photoshop 7 (www.adobe.come) and Macromedia FreeHand were called in as required for touching them up.
The book was designed and laid out in Adobe PageMaker 6.5 on a PowerBook G4 and Power Mac G4. The fonts used include Formata (as the sans-serif family) and Minion (as the serif body face). To provide the apple logo and figs command symbols, a custom font was created using Macromedia Fontographer.
The book was generated as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file for proofreading and indexing, and final transmission to the printing plant in the form of PostScript files.
Comments about O'Reilly Media iMovie 3 & iDVD: The Missing Manual:
As usual for the Missing Manual series, this is an excellent book. Beginning with the basics of how to choose a camera and proceeding through some of the two software packages' fancier features, the readable style keeps the staggering amount of information presented from seeming overwhelming to the reader.
They take a one-star knock, though, because I'm a credit where credit is due kind of guy and there's nothing on the cover or promotional material to indicate that the iDVD portion of the book was written by Erica Sadun, not David Pogue.
8/8/2003
5.0
iMovie 3 & iDVD: The Missing Manual Review
By Blair Hardman
from Undisclosed
Comments about O'Reilly Media iMovie 3 & iDVD: The Missing Manual:
"Pogue's new iMovie manual reads better than a Grisham novel"
The only problem I had with this manual was that I sat up in bed until 4:00 AM reading it, and then I couldn't wait to get into my studio in the morning to get back on the program.
Pogue's writing is engaging, concise, accurate, irreverent and very funny. And he leaves "trim handles" - little bits of knowledge on each side of the subject that you didn't know you needed, but would come in handy later.
