Customer Reviews

Avid Liquid 7 for Windows: Visual QuickPro Guide

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

 

 

Generally speaking, the one thing that anger's most software owners is it's ineffective and poorly written user manual. In many cases, product documentation is written by the same people who create the product's underlying code. Rarely do these people understand what it is like to use the product. So while the documentation may be technically accurate, it's organization, context, appearance and overall utility severely suffers.

Liquid users take heart... relief is in sight. For those of us who still like to rummage through the printed page, I am so glad to see a book (written by a film maker) that breaks the stereotypes of what we know as "user documentation."

This book is not a tutorial, but serves similar objectives. Its almost as if Paul Ekert, the author, is looking over your shoulder and directing you on how to accomplish a specific task.

By the time Avid was ready to release their new 7.0 version of Liquid, Paul Ekert released this updated version of his book. If you are familiar with his book on Pinnacle Liquid Edition 6, he did a lot more that simply swap the name Pinnacle for Avid and increment the 6 to a 7. Building upon the success of his 6.0 book, Paul took this opportunity to fully update his reference manual. Going well beyond Liquid's new features, improvements were made to the book's organization thus allowing users to find answers in a much more efficient manner.

Most manuals sit on a bookshelf and are only utilized when you have a question. What I especially like about this book is its overall readability. Paul's friendly writing style will appeal to many Liquid editors.

Recommendation: Even if you have the previous version of this book, you will want to keep you library current with this version. The bottom line a good read and an awesome reference.

When you are a daily user of the Liquid system and work in a editing team, the Avid Liquid Reference Manual is the place to find answers to all your questions.

If you don't belong to these group of people, the reference manual still will give you all the answers, but the problem may be you don't understand the answer.

Paul Ekert, Avid Liquid for Windows deals with the same matherial, but he speaks a different language. This makes him much more understandable to a large audience.

There is very little in the way of published texts explaining the new version of AVID (formerly Pinnacle) LIQUID video editing software... but fortunately this book fills the void! As a professional video editing instructor and turnkey editing system reseller, I can appreciate a useful text when I read one, and I am happy to recommend this book to anyone who is just starting out with Liquid or Liquid Pro software. We advise our own students and clients to purchase copies, and would heartily endorse it to the general public. The author covers the material well and the book is populated with lots of screenshots illustrating the software menu's. He does not cover the "art" of editing, but rather focusses on the physical operation of Liquid, from capturing the raw footage through creation of the final product. I would have liked to see a little more coverage of splitting & trimming scenes, but overall I still think that this is the best textbook dealing with Liquid that I have yet to encounter.

The book is well writen and easy to follow, sadly the pictures next to the subjects did not come out very clearly.
I can recommend this book to any Avid Liquid 7 user to fully understand the software

Great book... Great tips and little tidd bits of information as well as being up to date.

I distrusted Liquid when I first got it ... what I really wanted but could not afford, was Final Cut Pro. As any Liquid user knows, the manual is poorly written. After a frustrating year on Liquid this book was the turning point for me ... it took me from a cutter to power user in a week!! Not only that, if you cross referance, (eg TIMEWARP & COLOUR CORRECTION) ... the Avid manual makes more sence ... the extra detail is all there. I can now afford FCP but having tried it again recently, it seems akward and old fashioned. For me, thanks to Paul Ekert ... Liquid Rocks! This book is a "Must have"

I am just about to purchase the book. Last night at a Liquid users group I had a question about what the purpose of a sub track was. We discussed the issue because the liquid help did not even have an entry for track. However someone produced "The Book" which provided an excellent description. As I looked through the book I knew I had to get my own copy.

Alistair MacDonald

The writing is crisp, friendly, and at the right depth. The knowledge of Paul Eckert definitely seems sound. The book should be sufficient for most people who've figured out their kindergarten video editor that came with your computer like Windows Movie Maker. (I'm used to Final Cut Pro on Mac and find it more intuitive, but my Mac has turned unreliable. Oh, back to the book.) It seems indispensable, especially the handholding offered for getting Liquid 7 loaded and running, which was hard to find or make sense of in the Avid User Guide that came with the software. (In my case, the software came without the interface "box" that comes with the "Pro" version.)

Eckert's book doesn't attempt to hit every filter, special effect, and titling technique, but gives you a reasonable sampling of each including keyframing. Color correction is hit in some detail, I thought a bit on the shallow side, but this isn't the Lexus of video software, either. I need to play with the software some more, so don't take color correction as a problem with the book. I see that the Avid User Guide is now more understandable to me and they can suppliment each other in the deeper areas. Eckert's Avid Liquid for Windows helped me avoid a whole lot of trial-and-error. It's also good as a desk reference, to help get you through some puzzling task.

Unfortunately, I'm tempted to give it three stars for the poor clarity and contrast in the printing of its gray-scale graphic screen-shots used in its many illustrative figures. I had to grab a magnifying glass if there was a point that seemed essential in the figure but not covered in the writing. The figures apparently were given to hazily hint at general layout with two or three explanatory arrows, and not for all the details and for this, they were sufficient. (Printed in China, I thought, but no, it was in Berkley, maybe at some local Xerox machine.)

I'm one who pre-reads these things in bed before even loading the software, probably a good idea here since there is a lot of help and cautions associated with setting up separate hard drives for capture media and render files. I highly recommend the book for Liquid 7 newbies like me who do tend to need and use user manuals.