Book Description
So you've purchased a digital camcorder, hooked it up to your PC and now you're in business. You can download Jr.'s birthday party to your hard drive and show it to every unsuspecting friend that drops by. But what you really want to do is learn how to edit and manipulate your footage to create attractive videos. How to Use Digital Video teaches you the basic techniques, such as setting up a good shot, configuring your PC, re-arranging scenes, trimming out unnecessary footage, adding transitions, creating special effects, and even adding a soundtrack. Author Dave Johnson uses several real-world projects to show you how to implement the lessons he teaches. By the end of the book, you'll be able to create a polished home video, film for a Web page, a streaming video that could be used in a PowerPoint presentation, and a montage of still photos within a video.

From the Back Cover
So you've purchased a digital camcorder, hooked it up to your PC and now you're in business. You can download Jr.'s birthday party to your hard drive and show it to every unsuspecting friend that drops by. But what you really want to do is learn how to edit and manipulate your footage to create attractive videos. How to Use Digital Video teaches you the basic techniques, such as setting up a good shot, configuring your PC, re-arranging scenes, trimming out unnecessary footage, adding transitions, creating special effects, and even adding a soundtrack. Author Dave Johnson uses several real-world projects to show you how to implement the lessons he teaches. By the end of the book, you'll be able to create a polished home video, film for a Web page, a streaming video that could be used in a PowerPoint presentation, and a montage of still photos within a video.

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews   15 of 16 people found the following review helpful: Shows what you can do with a camcorder and how to do it, January 25, 2001 By  David M. Ng (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews    I'm thinking of getting a digital camcorder and I wanted to see what I would be able to do with it. From that perspective, the book is a success. First it discusses the equipment: the basics of using a camcorder, and setting up your computer for video. The book then goes through tasks of basic editing, titles (including effects such as rolling), audio, and working with still images (I learned video tools can also be used for making slide shows). Finally, now that you have your video, the book covers producing videotape, publishing to the Web or CD-ROM, and adding video to PowerPoint presentations. The book is organized into chapters that cover various tasks such as adding titles or making credits roll. The book also has four projects that serve to tie the tasks together. The book comes with a CD-ROM that includes trial versions of the software discussed in the book (including video editors MGI VideoWave and Adobe Premiere). While the book is targeted towards readers who already have a camcorder, for my use the book would have been stronger if it discussed purchasing a camcorder. And, since I don't yet have a camcorder, it would have been nice if the CD-ROM included sample videos so I could try the various techniques described in the book. Overall, the book showed me what I could do with a camcorder, and that tools such as VideoWave make the process fairly straightforward.  Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)   10 of 10 people found the following review helpful: