Saturday, November 7, 2009

Book Spotlight: iMovie 09 and iDVD The Missing Manual

We've got David Pogue & Aaron Miller's popular iMovie and iDVD book here in the lab for you to use--just ask the lab consultant on duty if you don't see it on the shelf.

From Amazon.com's review of the book:

The first three chapters show how to prepare your video before using iMovie and include lots of professional filmmaking advice. The chapters on editing are the heart of the book. They systematically take you through each feature and menu--working with clips; adding transitions, titles, and sound; and saving and exporting your work. Since this isn't an official manual, Pogue is free to point out iMovie's shortcomings. In sidebars, he shows how to exploit features iMovie does have to mimic features you get only with more expensive software--for example, how to create multiple simultaneously superimposed titles (great for wild typographic experiments) or how to "pot down" the soundtrack music to allow a voiceover.


To make better choices while saving your movie, the book discusses each of the save options, as well as how QuickTime works--in detail. Also, the book doesn't just suggest what software to use to burn a QuickTime movie onto a CD-ROM, it also shows how to make a Video CD. It even includes the HTML necessary to embed your movie into a Web page. In fact, this book contains an impressive amount of info. It's easy to jump in at any point in the text and discover some idea so exciting that you just have to boot up iMovie right away and get creative.


We have iMovie 09 (the latest version) installed our workstations, but just in case you're using the previous version (iMovie 08), we've got an older edition of the book, too. So make sure you're reading the right one.

As always, we ask that you use our books here in the lab rather than taking them to other parts of the library.

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