Digital Video for Beginners: A Step-By-Step Guide to Making Great Home Movies

I would recommend this book as a start here before anything else. Even though you'de have had a camera for months and years but just shoot movies where the ones you share it with are happy to get away from it. Buy it, it teaches you in very in an easy non jargon way how to do things looking good and impress the audence. It is good when people ask for a copy after they've seen the movie. And you hear they wantch it over and over. I love this book it is brilliant.

I'm a semi-pro photographer of stills, based in film, now dSLR's and so I understand fairly well photographic considerations in acquiring good images! This book will easily help beginners and existing still photographers bridge the gap into Digital Video capture. Going beyond just understanding the latest advances in digital camcorders, the book guides you through actual processes of capturing good story-telling footage, things that we see in broadcast everyday, but probably don't give much of a thought as to how video was captures, sequenced and edited. I was really looking for such a guide as a starting place as i just purchased a Sony HDR-HC7 mini-DV camcorder ... and needed to know basic camera operation, as well as shooting techniques and video editing techniques. The book is VERY well laid out, simple to read and find headings and TIPS as needed - I think I'll pull from this volume a great deal of useful information and wish to thank the author!

After an extensive research I tried my luck and bought this book (as I could not preview the content), and I am really impressed with it. This is the perfect book for someone who really wants to learn video photography, as opposed to just learning to buy the greatest gadget and press the right buttons, thereby capturing worthless video. I am an advanced amateur photographer for the last 15 years, and I know that taking good photo is 90% work of the mind - finding out the perfect frame and the perfect moment to shoot a great photograph, and 10% work of the hand to use the camera. Most of the other Digital Video books focus mostly on the later 10% aspect. Not this book - It teaches you extensively what to look for in a good video and how to get them. The book is divided into 5 sections:- - What you need to know about your camcorder - Step-by-step shooting techniques - How to shoot great home movies - Step-by-step digital video-editing techniques - Showing and sharing your movies The sections about "shooting techniques" and "great home movies" are the largest in this book, and that's what I liked. The author is a professional in this field (former television producer, editor and cameraman), unlike authors of other books who are either wannabe movie producers or small movie makers. The other books instruct you to write down a storyboard on paper which is not feasible in a vacation movie or capturing unpredictable activities of your newborn. Here you will learn how to think so that you can create a great story on the fly. This book is filled with lots of tips used by professionals, one good example is: not to use the zoom during shooting. Most professional productions do not contain zooming sequence. They take a wide angle shot to show the background, then next shot they show a close up of the subject, the zooming being done off-camera. Lots of zooming sequence is the typical sign of a poor home video. On the whole, this is a perfect book to study before diving into the world of serious video photography.

Whether it's your first camcorder or whether you're moving into digital video from analog, you need Digital Video For Beginners, a guide which goes beyond the owner's manual: one that covers all the basics from choosing the right camera to using it efficiently and getting great shots from vacations, events and more. The examples are quick and easy to follow whether you're reading cover-to-cover or looking for quick answers. A handy little guide which should've been packed with every digital video.