Making Imovies

All those 'how to edit video' books out there are great, but they all start out assuming you have video! Scott Smith takes you by the hand with a DVD full of pre-shot footage, so you can test out iMovie and use it to tell real stories, not just your cousin's wedding video. Unlike most books that tell you to buy lots of expensive equipment, he tells you how to create real mini-movies on a budget, complete with special effects, like recording bacon frying to get a 'sizzling in the sun' sound! This book is visually appealing and approachable. I learned a lot from it.

I'm sure you've seen the Apple TV commercials: make digital home movies, including professional-standard fades, cuts and credits, on your iMac DV! Enticed by these dramatic TV commercials, I bought an iMac DV, but of course there was no iMovie instruction manual included. One of the only laments I have about Apple these days is the lack of documentation and instruction books included with their new computers (and their online help features are frequently confusing, anemic, and infuriating to use), but luckily a whole new range of books are being published to cope with this lack. This is one of the first iMovie instruction manuals published, and though I can't make any comparisons yet with the many that will likely follow, this is a great instruction and idea manual. This largish-format paperback (9 x 9 inches) takes you step-by-step through planning your iMovie, storyboarding, filming on your digital camera, editing, scoring, and adding sound and credits. Lots of color illustrations show you examples as well as screen-shot menus that make the process clear and easy-to-follow. There's an excellent general theory section on storytelling on film, many examples of how to make your shots more dramatic, how to get around the basic limitations of shooting digitally or showing your iMovies on a computer screen, troubleshooting, things to avoid, and much more. Among the great tips it offered that I didn't know and *needed* to know is how to convert Quicktime files into iMovie format. Most important, this book contains a DVD-ROM with all the files you need for three separate project exercises in editing, scoring, adding sound and credits. Most "exercises" provided with computer manuals are usually pretty lame, but *not* these...they're entertaining, well-shot short-short film segments (you put `em together into three films), with a tongue-in-cheek quality and twist endings that make them fun to work on, *not* laborious. So, in short, this a great introduction and beginner's manual to a user-friendly but very detailed Macintosh program in specific and novice filmmaking in general. While the page count (138 pages) may seem anemic for $39.95, the large amount of color and the DVD-ROM featuring imaginative projects to use as exercises and source material go a long way to making this a good buy. I'm eagerly awaiting a competing book: David Pogue's "iMovie: The Missing Manual" (ISBN 1565928598)--Pogue is one of the recognized experts on all things Mac and *always* entertaining to read--but *this* book is a great way to start out making your own iMovies. Narration by Jeff Goldblum not included.

Scott Smith's "Making iMovies" is terrific. It contains specific tutorials and instructions, enjoyable movies made by the author and is easy to follow. I have not read the other books on the subject (indeed, they have not yet been published), but, for my money, it would be hard to beat this excellent, extremely informative and enjoyable book.