Last updated 5/15/2005

iMovie HD and iDVD 5: The Missing Manual

iMovie HD and iDVD 5: The Missing Manual
Author: David Pogue
Publisher: Pogue Press, O'Reilly
516 pages ... ... $29.95
ISBN 0-596-10033-7
The book that should have been in the box

iMovie HD and iDVD 5: The Missing Manual begins with the most important step, getting the video. This includes both the technical and the artistic side of capturing digital video footage with instructions for buying a camcorder, taking good movies and capturing sound with quality lighting and composition. It covers filming interviews, music videos, live stage performances, speeches, sports, weddings and actual scripted films.

Part two covers everything about movie editing in iMovie from getting the footage into iMovie, building the movie, using all the available transitions and effects, and adding titles, captions, and credits, and professional editing techniques. There is a fastenating chapter on narration, music and sound. I have used iMovie to edit radio recordings - it is not the best editor, but it is free.

A chapter on still pictures and QuickTime movies includes instructions on importing and using still pictures, the Ken Burns effect, and using QuickTime movies is intended to show how to use these tools to enhance your camcorder movies, but it opens the possibility of creating movies using your digital camera instead of a camcorder. Part 2 ends with the artistic side of professional quality editing.

Part Three is about Finding Your Audience, with different ways to present your finished movies including transferring to tape or to QuickTime and burning QuickTime movie CDs, and putting your movie on your Web site or on a phone.

Part 3 ends with QuickTime Player which is almost another free book - almost QuickTime The Missing Manual. It includes QuickTime editing that you cannot do in iMovie and and even how to show a movie within a movie.

Part Four really is iDVD 5: The Missing Manual with special credit to Erica Sadun. What iDVD really does is to is to add window dressingÑmenus, buttons, and so on-to movies, music, and photos created in other programs. That is some kind of understatement!

This part begins with instructions for putting your iMovie into iDVD and burning the DVD. It contains instructions for creating iDVD projects, designing iDVD themes, and iDVD secrets. iDVD may be the world's best delivery mechanism for digital photos begins the section of DVD slideshows, and she explains what makes it the best.

There are instructions for creating a disk image or your iDVD and for burning it to a DVD using and external DVD burner if you do not have a Superdrive. Then you can send DVDs that all your friends and relatives can play on their their DVD players, or even sell them.

If you own a camcorder, iMovie HD & iDVD 5 is the missing manual that can help you produce movies that people will really enjoy seeing. But there are many more digital camera owners who could produce better slide shows, and even produce DVDs with a mixture of video clips taken on a digital camera with still slides and distribute them for viewing on almost universal DVDs'

For more information or to buy iMovie HD and iDVD 5: The Missing Manual go to
http://www.oreilly.com
or
http://www.missingmanuals.com