Making iMovies (Paperback)

by Scott Smith (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Just as digital cameras revolutionized still photography, digital motion-picture devices are sure to have a big effect on the home and amateur video scenes. Making iMovies shows how you--the owner of a video camera, and with an interest in digital movie production--can make professional-quality video sequences on your personal computer. Author Scott Smith's editing platform of choice? The Apple iMac DV, or any other Macintosh computer with a FireWire interface for external devices. Smith presents a beautifully illustrated guide to the techniques of telling stories and eliciting emotions via digital video.

As you'd expect, Smith covers his bases in terms of explaining iMovie's essential capabilities. More valuably, he takes readers beyond the basics of connectivity and clip splicing. A typical example: While makers of traditional film-based movies can depict characters against a brick-wall background with no worries, bricks can cause jitter and compression problems in digitally recorded sequences. Therefore, Smith says, digital video producers need to zoom closer to subjects that are backed by a complicated surface. Not all of his advice is as explicitly technical. He also offers advice on orienting elements in the video frame, choosing subtle but effective music, selecting costumes, and storyboarding. He's written (and, no less importantly, helped lay out) a superb book that balances the technical and artistic sides of digital video production on the Macintosh. --David Wall

Topics covered: Digital video production, with emphasis on the tools and resources available on the iMac DV and other editing platforms based on Mac OS and FireWire. Using the iMovie application as his prime tool, the author explains story planning, visual design, time management, and other technical aspects of videography. Sound, lighting, music, costumes, and the like receive ample coverage, as do editing techniques, titling, transitions, and narration.

Product Description
This book shows you how to make movies using nothing more than a DV camcorder and an iMac computer. A primer on moviemaking for the Internet, this book demystifies the process by eliminating technical mumbo-jumbo and infusing the reader with a sense of confidence. By illustrating the features of Apple's iMovie software, the author guides the reader through the process of making short movies for delivery over the WWW; includes lesson files, video clips, sound effects, music scores, illustrations, and still photos to enhance the tutorial projects.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 156 pages
• Publisher: Pearson Education (April 21, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201704897
• ISBN-13: 978-0201704891
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,664,123 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent iMovie guide with a *great* DVD-ROM, May 10, 2000

By	John DiBello (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm sure you've seen the Apple TV commercials: make digital home movies, including professional-standard fades, cuts and credits, on your iMac DV! Enticed by these dramatic TV commercials, I bought an iMac DV, but of course there was no iMovie instruction manual included. One of the only laments I have about Apple these days is the lack of documentation and instruction books included with their new computers (and their online help features are frequently confusing, anemic, and infuriating to use), but luckily a whole new range of books are being published to cope with this lack. This is one of the first iMovie instruction manuals published, and though I can't make any comparisons yet with the many that will likely follow, this is a great instruction and idea manual. This largish-format paperback (9 x 9 inches) takes you step-by-step through planning your iMovie, storyboarding, filming on your digital camera, editing, scoring, and adding sound and credits. Lots of color illustrations show you examples as well as screen-shot menus that make the process clear and easy-to-follow. There's an excellent general theory section on storytelling on film, many examples of how to make your shots more dramatic, how to get around the basic limitations of shooting digitally or showing your iMovies on a computer screen, troubleshooting, things to avoid, and much more. Among the great tips it offered that I didn't know and *needed* to know is how to convert Quicktime files into iMovie format. Most important, this book contains a DVD-ROM with all the files you need for three separate project exercises in editing, scoring, adding sound and credits. Most "exercises" provided with computer manuals are usually pretty lame, but *not* these...they're entertaining, well-shot short-short film segments (you put `em together into three films), with a tongue-in-cheek quality and twist endings that make them fun to work on, *not* laborious. So, in short, this a great introduction and beginner's manual to a user-friendly but very detailed Macintosh program in specific and novice filmmaking in general. While the page count (138 pages) may seem anemic for $39.95, the large amount of color and the DVD-ROM featuring imaginative projects to use as exercises and source material go a long way to making this a good buy. I'm eagerly awaiting a competing book: David Pogue's "iMovie: The Missing Manual" (ISBN 1565928598)--Pogue is one of the recognized experts on all things Mac and *always* entertaining to read--but *this* book is a great way to start out making your own iMovies. Narration by Jeff Goldblum not included.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars It's amazing that books like this get published, March 30, 2001

By A Customer

This is one of the worst 'how to' books that I have ever read. I bought it on the assumption that it would take me a little further than the David Pogue's "Missing Manual" (which is an excellent book). However, it most certainly does not, in fact it is badly written, full or errors, and actually has some genuinely dubious advice regarding technique. I have no idea why the people that gave this book a good review did so. I can only assume that they are friends of the author, and didn't actually read the book.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The Worst Book I've Seen In a Long Time, March 8, 2001

By A Customer

This book should not be on the market in its present error-filled state. Apparently the other reviewers who rate it so highly are looking at the book's pretty pictures. They surely have not tried to use the book as a new learner, as the book intends.

The book fails utterly as a tutorial. It has numerous factual errors, mismatches between book and actual experience, misleading language, etc. etc.

This book needs an overall edit in the worst way. At the very least someone should have gone through the tutorials (to make sure they worked!) before putting them into print.

The file for the very first lesson has a different name on the CD than the one given for it in the book, and does not start up with images already imported, as it should. And the web site they refer you to for enhanced coverage is a complete bust.

But that's just the start of your troubles if you're trying to use this book to learn iMovie. Go for David Pogue's Missing Manual. Infinitely superior, and half the price.