Customer Reviews

American Cinematographer Video Manual, Third Edition

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a handy little book which covers many technical aspects of video in one volume. It's been a great resource for my work and I'd recommend it to anyone who is technically minded and is interested in what makes things work and why things are the way they are with digital and analogue video. The reason I've given this particular book only 3 stars is that it has started to shed pages after only having been moderately read. The binding glue is brittle and the pages come flying out. Other than that it is a great book.

I just received a copy of the American Cinematographer Video Manual, 3rd addition. What a major disappointment. Cheap binding. Poorly printed black and white photographs. Margins are too wide on each page. Why not print more words on each page resulting in narrower margins? Because of fast changing technology the book really needs to be updated each year. That 2001 copyright resulted in much of the video equipment models being outdated. What an embarrassment for the American Cinematographer Society publishing division.

On the ASC website they misleadingly portray this book as updated with the latest information. Well, the copyright date for the 3rd edition is 2001, that's right, it's 10 years old. Other than the fundamentals on IRE levels and time code etc. it was a great disappointment to find little relevance to the remarkable advances in video based cinematography that have occured since the Red Cam for example.

I think this book covers alot of subjects, but the depth of each subject is very shallow. if I didn't know many of these things before reading this book I wouldn't understand more than half the explanaisions.
I still havn't finished reading because it's just not informitive enough