Customer Reviews

Motion for Mac OS X

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With the arrival of Apple Motion, there was very little get to the point instruction being offered. The Apple manual just didn't seem to get to the bare bones of the software, thereby leaving expensive DVDs as the biggest alternative. And I'm hardly knocking the Apple Pro Training Series readsApple Pro Training Series: Motion (Apple Pro Training) because I think they're great. What makes Motion for Mac OS X stand out is it's tremendous reference value. Need to know something? Go right to it. No tutorials or slick tricks, just basic "how to", and I like that. The more "how to" I get, the more creative I am.

The Visual Quickstart Guides from Peachpit Press have an interesting format that I rather like. Each page, or couple of pages, is devoted to a single subject. One of the two columns on the page has the text describing the subject and how to do whatever it is. The other column has a screen shot showing what the screen should look like.

I find this an easy way to learn what's going on. It's an interesting combination of a tutorial type book combined with a reference type book. You're not just given an endless list of do this, do that, now do .... Instead you can go through the book from start to finish picking out what's important to you. Or you can go to the index and quickly get sent to exactly the page that's talking about what you want.

As for the specific content of this book, it's written by a professional user of Motion that is also Apple-certified as a Motion and FinalCut Pro instructor. He knows what he's talking about and has the ability to conven his thoughts well. His experience in training others on using Motion has given him an understanding where problem areas lie and he can cover these to prevent later problems.