24 of 24 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great for Learning iMovie & iDVD, Nov 3 2004
By V. Maciulski - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: iMovie 4 and iDVD 4 for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide (Paperback)
iMovie and iDVD are two of the iLife programs that ship with your Macs. Many folks think that, because they are the "simple or basic" programs, that they don't have a lot of features or can't do professional looking movies.
The fact is, you can get VERY nice results with these applications. There was a fellow who won a prize at Sundance Film Festival for a movie he made entirely with a cheap miniDV camera and iMovie. If you have budding aspirations as a filmmaker, or you just want to video a birthday party or wedding, you can get great results, too.
Jeff Carlson's book is aimed at beginner-to-intermediate users. It takes a visual, step-by-step approach. Everything is explained well and accompanied by lots of photos.
I was really pleased to see that he devotes the first 50 pages of the book to explaining how to use the DV camera, including how to take good video to start out with. He covers focus, depth-of-field, lighting, composing your shots, how and when to move the camera, etc. The term "garbage-in-garbage-out" was invented for computers, but it is really true with video and photography, as well.
Part 2 covers iMovie in logical order. He starts with an overview, then tells you how to import footage, edit video, edit still pictures for video, edit audio. He pays nice attention to the audio portion, including how to adjust the audio that came with the video, adding sound effects, music from iTunes and GarageBand, and adding audio from other sources. He also covers transitions, adding titles and making them look good on-screen, and adding visual effects to the movie.
Carlson calls Part 3 "Sharing." He tells you how to get your finished movie back to video tape or export it in other formats, such as QuickTime. Depending on the QuickTime compression scheme, you can put your movie on a CD, the web or send it via e-mail. And ... of course, you can send it to iDVD, complete with chapter markers.
Part 4 tells you everything you need to know to make a DVD. He tells you how to apply themes, customize them, create sub-menus, add chapters to an existing iDVD project, and creating slide shows with background audio. Then, he shows you how to create a project archive and burn the DVD. He finishes up with a chapter on troubleshooting.