iMovie: The Missing Manual

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iMovie: The Missing Manual Details

Amazon.com Review iMovie is a deceptively simple video-editing application that does not come with a printed manual. Even the online help is insufficient. David Pogue, the wry and insightful columnist for Macworld, fills the void with another entry in his new Missing Manual series. Through many workarounds, "hidden" features, and creative ideas, Pogue shows how you can use this powerful software to carry out ambitious film projects. This series is known for giving a lot of information at a bargain price, and this book is no exception. The text gets right to the point while leaving room for background info and tips that anticipate potential problems. Reading it is like listening to someone who has already worked through the steps. 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. --Angelynn Grant Topics covered: Complete user's-manual instructions for iMovie, including detailed descriptions of each menu, command, and feature. The book gives help on shooting and preparing video for capture (including professional filmmaking advice); editing clips; adding transitions, sound, and titles; saving and exporting movies (including help choosing formats); using professional video-editing software; and troubleshooting. Read more About the Author David Pogue, Yale '85, is the weekly personal-technology columnist for the New York Times and an Emmy award-winning tech correspondent for CBS News. His funny tech videos appear weekly on CNBC. And with 3 million books in print, he is also one of the world's bestselling how- to authors. In 1999, he launched his own series of amusing, practical, and user-friendly computer books called Missing Manuals, which now includes 100 titles. Read more