Slashdot Mirror
iMovie 3 & iDVD: The Missing Manual
I have previously reviewed iPhoto2: The Missing Manual and said "The target audience for this book would probably be a little less technical than myself or the average Slashdot reader, however when I find myself in a field I don't understand well I don't mind a little stuff for the absolute newbie" -- and once again this is true. iMovie 3 & iDVD: The Missing Manual finds me in an area where I am technically inferior. Once again I truly appreciated this book and its style.
The book is broken up into four sections, one devoted to video cameras and shooting a movie, a large one on editing in iMovie 3, and smaller sections on exporting out of iMovie 3 and on using iDVD. At the end are two useful appendices: the first is a menu-by-menu look at iMovie 3, and the second is an iMovie 3 troubleshooting guide. The latter is often needed and always useful -- iMovie 3 still has more than one bug.
The first section gives a great deal of incredibly useful information about video cameras and how to use them, including hints on various types of shooting such as sporting events, interviews and weddings. The technical information on cameras is perfect if you have yet to buy a camera, including a guide to which features are essential and which unnecessary as you can do the same thing (only better) in iMovie 3. When it goes on to the 'how to shoot' section, you get pretty much the same advice you'll get anywhere, but since we didn't really read all of from the last book on video we read (and forgot half the bits we did read) it's nice to have it there again.
The second section does a good job of explaining the details of iMovie 3, even down to some of its shortcomings and bugs. I also appreciated the way it spent as much time on improving the quality of the finished film as it did telling me how to use the various parts of the software. It follows a logical sequence through the movie-making process, giving good details on how iMovie does the job, how to get the best result and what sort of things to avoid -- particularly useful for things like transitions and effects when less is best.
The third section, titled "Finding Your Audience," is a bit more of a problem. It really has nothing to do with finding an audience and a lot more to do with QuickTime. The section first spends ten pages telling us how to get our edited film back onto the camcorder or onto a VCR, then it spends a lot of time dealing with exporting to QuickTime, including posting movies to the web and some info on using the QuickTime player, including some "tricks" with QuickTime Player Pro.
The attention to the finished product in the second section carries through to the fourth section on iDVD, though the writing here is not quite as good. It is incredibly informative, however. I learned a great deal about putting together all sorts of iDVD projects, including ways of customizing almost every aspect of the finished product.
O'Reilly have the usual marketing stuff while Pogue Press have the handy little Missing CD section with links to all the free and shareware software mentioned in the book. Neither has a sample chapter or the table of contents, you can't even get either at Amazon.
One of the drawbacks of getting free software is that we don't get good free documentation. One of the benefits of free software is that we can choose which 'documentation' to buy. Some people might prefer the style of the 'Dummies' books, others the style of Peachpit's Visual Quickstart Guide. I've had a look at all three and like the balance of depth and explanation that Pogue has in his 'Missing Manual' series. I once again find myself recommending a 'Missing Manual' to everyone. While catering to the beginner, this book goes deep enough that all but the most long-term user of these two pieces of software will find something to learn in this volume.
You can purchase iMovie 3 & iDVD: The Missing Manual from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Oh, I'm a Republican
I got a small schling
I like to bomb niggahs
and make a lot o' bling
I got a bunch o' friends
in high up places
They helps me get dem
government graces.
You think I'm smart
I just know who's who
I couldn't run a fruit stand
without the red white & blue
I fancy myself
A brilliant tactician
But neither me nor m'buddies
Could even pass basic trainin'
See, I'm above all that
A fightin' and shootin'
I just say "Sic em!"
Then run the other direction
Don't need no history
Don't need no schoolin'
I got my ideology
To keep me a shootin'
Liberals! Faggots!
Commies and queers!
Socialist hippies
Full o' pussy tears!
I'll drop some crap
about Jesus the Christ
You'll buy it all
and vote for me twice
'Fact, Jesus is comin'!
Real soon, now!
So we gotta prop up Israel
That ol' sacred cow
Propaganda's m'friend
But I calls it "fact"
Even though I don't read
'Cept for Chick tracts
Facts? No! Don't need em here!
We're conservatives! We work on FEAR!
Don't like what we say?
Well FUCK YOU, bud!
We'll shove it down yer throat
and tell ya it's good!
God Bless America, with the worst crime levels in the first world
God Bless America, where "democracy" means a rich, white male as Presiden t
God Bless America, the biggest consumer of the world's natural resources
God Bless America, where "freedom of speech" means race-hate groups like KKK
God Bless America, and its massive and ever-growing poverty gap
God Bless America, with the highest obesity levels in the developed world
God Bless America, all its appalling "sitcoms" with no grasp of irony
God Bless America, because corporations should be allowed to run amok
God Bless America, wasting billions to attack foreign countries
God Bless America, and thank God I don't have to live there.
Indeed.
Think about it. They sell the computer and software with missing manuals, then you have to find and buy it separately.
Why was it missing in the first place, Mr. Jobs?
A product which doesn't come with its own manual? Wow that's useful. Now I'll rush out and buy an iDVD [whatever that is] *and* the iNot iIncluded iManual for an additional low price...
Next the manual will be in code and require an iDecoder Ring which will probably violate the iDMCA and cause the end of the iWorld as iWe iKnow iIt.
iSmart iAm!
iTom iOut iOf iHere.
[yes this is flamebait and yes I hate stupid people who buy incomplete products then rant about how great they are....]
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
You really NEED a manual for these programs? Ouch!
The target audience for this book would probably be a little less technical than myself or the average Slashdot reader
Have you seen the stats? 90% of slashdot users use windows or mac's
Not saying that nobody here is a tech, but honestly, the majority are actually not really techs.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
As digital video cameras spawn in the hands of you, me, parents and tourists like cockroaches in my kitchen....
Seriously, rather than buying a digital video camera you might consider finding a nicer place to live. Or at least call Orkin for cryin' out loud.
-- dR.fuZZo
Apple have come up with some innovative products, but their market share remains tiny. Sadly, though, many buyers have been mislead by the marketing and eye-candy, and desperately try to justify their overpriced purchases to themselves on forums around the Net. Let's see what they really mean...
"MacOS X is everything Linux wants to be."
"Despite the fact that Linux is just code and can't WANT to be anything, I truly believe that it'd love to be a single-vendor, single-platform, sluggish half-proprietary OS with dwindling market share. Linux would love to throw away its impressively growing corporate takeup for that."
"Apple hardware is for real computer lovers."
"It's no hassle to use a plethora of keyboard combos to make up for the patronising one-button mouse. Despite the fact that my hands have FIVE fingers, and multiple-buttons make Web browsing so much more pleasant, I prefer my computer to be treat me like a special-needs child."
"Aqua makes me so much more productive!"
"My non-techie friends drool over the transparency and scaling effects, even though UI research has shown that they add practically nothing to getting real work done. It feels like KDE 2 on a Pentium 200, and I can't change to a light and fast WM, but those drop-shadows must make me work so quickly!"
"OSX shows that Apple is committed to open source."
"OpenDarwin.org and its community of about 27 is surely not just a token gesture by Apple. Pretty much nobody uses pure Darwin, and all the crucial components of the system are closed and require me to spend money just to get major OS updates, but they're really helping the community somehow."
"You get what you pay for with Apple hardware."
"My iBook was made by in Taiwan by AlphaTop and has design and build quality flaws (needing foam sheets jammed in to stop the common problem of the keyboard scratching the screen). But it's silvery and cost far more than an x86 laptop of better spec, so it must be much higher quality!"
"...blah blah MHz myth blah..."
"Although there's truth in PPC being more elegant than x86, it's crushing that the top-of-the-range 1.5 GHz chip is slaughtered by the equivalent 3 GHz Pentium 4. However, Steve Jobs showed some vague Photoshop filter benchmarks at the last MacWorld, so being a leprotard, I'm convinced."
Froogle price comparision of this book!
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
I just bought a copy from the local Apple Store. Worth every penny. Humourous.
:)
I especially appreciated the admonition to buy DVD Studio Pro if you need anything more than the toy apps that are part of Apple's iLife suite. iDVD is nice, but it is limited, and not meant for serious work. Same w/iMovie, etc. Great starter apps...lousy production tools
Pay for documentation and support.
But what it really comes down to with most of you is free beer. You want free software, free documentation, AND free support.
Whenever one of those three is not free, you complain that you are getting ripped off.
Besides iDVD has an extensive on-line help system.
I spent all this money on a PC, and all this time learning Linux, and I'm still not cool?
man imovie man idvd
Badass Resumes
All these little i's in the posts are giving me flashbacks of my early days with my TI-99/4A
when my dad tried in vain to teach me to program.
100 for i=1 to 10
110 print i
120 i=i+1
130 if i11 goto 100
140 end
yup, fun stuff.
Or does he know his audience?
--- Ban humanity.
If you want to support retard patents, this book is 1 cent MORE at amazon!
If you want to figure out how to do neat and nifty things with iMovie, buy the Missing Manual book, but you certainly don't need it to use the software.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I haven't heard of David Pogue in years... I have always liked his writings. He use to write on the last page of MacWorld every month, but got replaced by some other (not as good) guy.
Anyone ever read Hard Drive by Pogue?
Reading all the posts about if Mac users are techincal or not. The real issue is what happens when you do something "Non-Standard" that seems logical.
I've had a hell of a time, trying to figure out why 16:9 DV video wouldnt work correctly in iMovie. Seems 16:9 isnt supported even thou sony handycams support it, and seem to be a very popular brand. So now I'm stuck with 16:9 video I cant use on my expensive mac. Being told I need to buy $1000 dollars worth of software to use the video.
Also, why You cant just export into Mpeg2 and have some good utiltiies to cut/chop the video.
Many things I can do under linux and windows, just seem impossible to do with standard tools, or the "Trick" to get something done isnt known to a new mac user.
Why did I buy a mac? Wanted to test out all the features, and ease of use, and play with OSX. There is alot of power there, but there are many missing features, or alternative methods to get a task done. You can dumb down help guids too much, and Apples help file is on par with "Idiots howto Guides". This book is on my must buy list.
I am reading a review of a manual?
That is among the worst novels I've ever read. The plot was stupid and unimaginative, the characters were dull, and it's rare to come across prose that cringe-inducing. Pogue was okay in MacWorld, though he tended to shrillness. He is not a fiction writer, however.
Your program won't work. It'll just keep prining out 1's indefinitely.
(I'm assuming that you forgot or HTML ate your less-than sign in line 130. Even so, it still won't work.)
You never closed your "for" loop with a "next." Instead, you cobbled together two ways of doing the same thing, repeatedly sending the program from line 130 to 100, where i gets re-set to 1 every time. You needed to either:
100 for i=1 to 10; print i; next; end
or:
100 i=1
110 print i; i=i+1
120 if i=11 then end
130 goto 110
The second example is not particularly elegant, but it'll work.
We'll just stick with your most relevant statement.
I hope you immediately boycott everything American - starting with Slashdot! ;-)
I guess it depends on what you define as "serious work".
I recently used the iMovie and iDVD combo to create some training videos (introduction to using and troubleshooting computers and our software builds on them, for daycare/childcare centers), and while it wasn't perfect - it worked out pretty well.
I considered delving into DVD Studio Pro and Final Cut Pro, but the learning curve was more than I wanted to tackle for this project.
The biggest annoyance I find with iDVD is the way it throws the stock intro movies "in your face", and practically begs you to use them with every movie disc you make. They're nice templates for home movies (kid's birthday or what-have-you), but you certainly want to skip them if you're doing anything more professional.
There are some very nice add-on packs for iMovie though (Slick Transitions and EZEdia plug-in packs, for example), quite reasonably priced ($49 or so per volume, typically), that will greatly enhance the usability of the app.
The EZedia ones, in particular, allow filming in front of a blue screen and adding background movies behind the subject in the original film, overlaying logos on your movie, and much more. This isn't really "toy" stuff - and it's much cheaper than buying Final Cut Pro.
I haven't had reason to work with 16:9 aspect video yet myself (even though my Sony camcorder is capable of it), but I do recall seeing a discussion about this same issue you describe.
It seems to me they said something about iMovie not supporting 16:9 aspect ratio itself, but it would still allow you to import the 16:9 video and would export it again, unaltered, when told to export the movie. This isn't great, but at least it's not butchering your video when it imports it. You just can't preview it properly while in iMovie (if I'm understanding what I read correctly).
Most likely, Apple made a decision not to support 16:9 aspect in iMovie because it's their "consumer-grade" video editor (in some ways, a competitor to Microsoft's Movie Maker they include with Windows XP). Working with wide-screen format video is generally considered a "higher-end" filming project - and Apple would like you to spend the $'s for Final Cut Express or Pro for that sort of thing.
Remember back in the day when, if an O'Reilly book existed on a given topic, it was guaranteed to be the hands-down must-have last-word on the subject?
Now it's worthless Missing Manuals for Dummies in 21 Days. Can anyone pin-point the O'Reilly title that marked the beginning of the end?
Agreed about Final Cut, but the new version of DVD studio (1.5 was a bear) is really nice. It's encoding a project right now, as a matter of fact. Its got 3 different modes to let you get the right level of detail about your project, basic (similar to iDVD, extended and advanced.
Mod point free since 2001
I have been totally annoyed with iMovie 3. One of the main problems I've had with it is that the dv files it produces appear to have major, major problems. I haven't found a non-mac player which will play the dv files (other file types are better, but you would think the "raw" format would be pretty good).
My goal was to edit in iMovie (because our A/V equipment is hooked up to a Mac) and encode using MJPEGtools, but the output from iMovie was so broken it just didn't work.
Engineering and the Ultimate
It dosen't need it. I've been using Mac OS X for about 2 years now. None of these applications need a manual.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Too many users seem chagrined about not being able to create fluid epics via iDVD. I'm always amused by the ones that complain about the 60~90 minute limit of iDVD. It wasn't that long ago that it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to push video around the way we can with iMovie and iDVD. I can make worthwhile video with both of them. Your expectations sound appropriate.
:)
While I would never attempt to catagorize one person's efforts, the line between hobby and serious is clear when the limits of the free apps are encountered. I have no issue with this practice. I can find out if I really want to go deep into video making without spending the money for FCP or DVDSP. Seems ironic, however, that to get the most out of the 'free' apps, you need to spend $$ to buy this book
For those that think they're getting the world with the iLife suite, think again. After spending +/-$3k on the computer and +/-$2k on the camera, another grand or so for 'real' software seems fair.
Consider Final Cut Express - much cheaper than FCP, has most of the features, at a much lower price point, and downright dirt cheap if you qualify for an academic license.
...For those that think they're getting the world with the iLife suite, think again.
Thing is, did anybody think that? Did someone seriously think they were getting professional-level video editing software, in iMovie, with the free suite? Does anyone mistake iPhoto for Photoshop?
Personally I thought I was getting some really handy organizational software for all those digital snaps, a nice little database interface for lots of songs, and movie authoring stuff that'd be great for anything on the level of a home movie. That's what the "digital hub" claims to be, right? Judging by my nine(now ten)-year-old kids' success in using the suite of programs, it's a resounding success. For home users the limits are well-chosen, to judge by us.
For example, the 60-minute limit on highest-quality iDVD burns is a lot of video. We're talking home movies, here. We can fit half a summer's worth of video onto one disk, easily, in anything like an edited form.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
w/r/t needing to spend an extra grand - you're referring to Final Cut Pro, I presume; also check out Final Cut Express (~$250 or free [beer] if you can dig up a Premiere install disc somewhere). FCExpress works with widescreen aspect ratios.
Several threads here have mentioned the limitations of iMovie.
Linux users may want to check out the free package Cinelerra, it's a very capable piece of editing / compositing software. It's probably something that would be valuable on OSX, if it hasn't been ported there already.
I just checked Amazon, and they have 29 sample pages. It's mostly the TOC and the Index.
How is it that so many stories about apple related things, such as this one, do not make it into the Apple section of /.?
I go to the local bookstore and see tons of books like this in the computer section. "How to operate the easiest software you've ever laid hands on," etc. Not only are these (especially Apple iApps) pieces of software extremely easy to use immediately, they actually do have online help. Waste of paper and shelf space, if you ask me.
"I've got to stop masturbating! It makes me too lazy! Stop it, Albert. Stop it." -- Albert Einstein
Saying things don't need a manual is assuming everyone's brain works the same. Preposterous! Every brain/mind/whatever test out there shows clearly there are numerous different styles of learning. Therefore some people will always need a manual.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
Just wanted to point out, though, that the sample chapter, table of contents, index, etc., are now posted at missingmanuals.com. I was just a little behind getting around to it.
--Pogue