Customer Reviews

CNET Do-It-Yourself Home Video Projects: 24 Cool Things You Didn't Know You Could Do!

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Exceptional, Very Useful "Do-It-Yourself" Book !!!! I found the book easy to follow and understand with organized projects, making video taking of family and vacations easier than it has been in the past. The book chapters are an easy read and made me want to expand my video project capability. The book is filled with easy step-by-step "key points" with photos to help along. Most of all, the book was extremely practical for the whole family, whether to shoot great vacation footage or a birth announcement. Some of the other great features of the book was how to stream video to your computer and my favorite was how to archive your videos, for long standing memories. Being that I love shooting video on vacation and of my family, this book is an amazing and well put together, asset to the CNET Do-It-Yourself books. Easy for amateurs and professionals, as well !!

This book could have been 1/3 the size and price if it didn't focus in descriptions of how to use different video programs. If they extracted the Premiere Elements copy and made a video book just on that program it would be much smaller and less costly ... but I found that it spends so much time telling you how to use iMovie (apple), Ulead and a bunch of other programs you probably don't use that the process gets confusing and learning more difficult. There is some 'basic' movie making ideas you can use regardless of the softeware or camera, but even though the authors lean a little towards Premiere Elements they try to be all things to all people and destroy the learning process. I found myself liking some fo the features on other software I wasn't using and felt a lot of it wasted my time due to this conflicting confusion.

Don't get me wrong - there is a lot of good ideas on what kind of movies you can do, how to prepare and shoot them and put the DVD together. I just wish there was a similar book available that devoted itself to one software instead of about 5 of them. Five different books would be much better than one book trying to cover all the programs.

No color illustrations .. just B&W .. and some of them quite dark. For what you get, I feel the price is too high. Next to nothing on high def.

This book specifically shows you how to do some (not very useful) home video projects. It may have some tips that prove to be useful but otherwise have not gotten much out of it. bought it for $5 and can say it really wasn't worth it. If your looking for a good book on digital video pick up The little digital video book (second edition), by Michael Rubin. It is a great book with tons of useful stuff.