Customer Reviews

iMovie 09 and iDVD for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide

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

 

 

Typically, Peachpit's Visual Quickstart Guide jumps you into a program giving you the "quickstart" to get working and obtain a basic understanding of the program. This book didn't follow that theme as closely as others in the series, but it's still an excellent guide to iMovie 09. If you buy only one book on iMovie, I firmly believe this should be the one. It's short, straightforward and highly accessible to someone who has never used a video camera before.

The book starts off with the essentials of movie making on your Mac, discussing important topics such as AV equipment, movie planning, lighting and composition. These preliminary chapters are an absolute gem. While I've worked with iMovie before, I never really understood the essentials of lighting, focus, and composition. A great iMovie starts out with the fundamentals and the first five chapters of the book are devoted to just this.

Next, the book gives you a "Make a Movie in a Hurry" overview of iMovie so you can quickly complete a task and have some initial success. Then, the author goes in detail about iMovie in a logical progression as to how the typical project would go: importing, editing, and exporting. Throughout the chapters the author includes tips and tricks not just about the usage of iMovie, but why a user should care about certain functions. Knowing all the features of iMovie doesn't really help unless you know how to use them in your projects to enhance your work. After reading this book, I understood much more of the power of iMovie and how to use the features of iMovie to make better movies.

Ironically, what's missing from the book is a guide to iDVD. One small chapter is devoted to iDVD and then the author directs you to his website for another 60 or so pages of iDVD info: [...] That's my major con of the book: the title is extremely misleading. This is NOT a book about iDVD, it's strictly about iMovie. I can't imagine why the book was titled and distributed the way it was.

Pros: Easy to understand, accessible
Cons: No iDVD printed materials in book

I highly recommend this book. It is clear and easy to use. I also bought and rated the iMovie book in the 'Personal Genius' series, which is also excellent. I use both and have found them to be excellent and I quickly learned a tremendous amount on a program that isn't that easy to learn on your own. It also is very beneficial for learning how iMovie stores your events and projects, which is very different than other programs so necessary to learn via a professional book. I am very happy with this. Well worth it.

I recently switched to the Mac world from PC primarily for my video editing work. So I am completely unfamiliar with iMovie and video editing in general when using a Mac. For this reason, I purchased this book to help me get my feet wet with iMovie.

Although the book is well laid out, with excellent colour photos and plenty of screen shot examples, I immediately stumbled upon a major problem which this book could not help me with. I have hooked my Sony video cam up to my Mac, and come hell or high water, I cannot get iMovie to capture video from the camera.

The chapter in this book does not provide a trouble shooting section of what do if when you hit the capture button, and capture for three minutes, nothing is actually captured to your Mac during the capture. Nada.

So what I did was go back to the store, I spent $200 on Final Cut Express .. and had no problem at all capturing the footage to my Mac... without using any book!

So my conclusion is that this book did not properly provide me with the information I needed to successfully capture footage from iMovie. It was a waste of my money, and I will not be using the book or iMovie any more. Thumbs down.

This book os a great book for learning how to use these products. It works well either to read from cover to cover (recommended) and as a reference when you need to look things up. I love the page layout with bulleted instructions and illustrations of what you should see. Highly recommended for newcomers and above.

Bought this item in respect to author and publisher for sharing some content free of charge on [...]

Yet to master this book, but it looks pretty good by the samples I've seen.