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iMovie 3 & iDVD: The Missing Manual 112

Posted by timothy from the manual-control dept.
honestpuck writes "As digital video cameras spawn in the hands of you, me, parents and tourists like cockroaches in my kitchen we find ourselves needing the kind of technical and aesthetic help not really seen since the advent of 'desktop publishing'. Once again a 'Missing Manual' has come to my help." Read on for honestpuck's review of David Pogue's iMovie 3 & iDVD: The Missing Manual.
iMovie 3 & iDVD: The Missing Manual
author David Pogue
pages 456
publisher Pogue Press/O'Reilly
rating 7 - Good book, some flaws
reviewer Tony Williams
ISBN 0596005075
summary A quality introduction to two closely tied products.

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.
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iMovie 3 & iDVD: The Missing Manual More

iMovie 3 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

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  • Cockroaches... (Score:5, Funny)

    by dR.fuZZo ( 187666 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @11:34AM (#6851056)
    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.

    • Could we please see a video of the said cockroaches spawning in your kitchen?

      /imagines a monster respawning in doom
    • Don't be snooty. Even nice apartments in some places can have cockroaches.

  • Good book (Score:4, Informative)

    by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @11:37AM (#6851087)
    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 :)

    • Re: iDVD, etc. (Score:5, Informative)

      by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @12:15PM (#6851355) Journal
      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.
      • 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.

      • Re: iDVD, etc. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by djupedal ( 584558 )
        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 fr
        • 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.

          ...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 organizat

    • Re:Good book (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Cirrocco ( 466158 )
      Yeah, but there ARE some nifty things you can do with it if you work hard enough at it.
      Example: Here's a short movie I put together (10 secs, 5.9 MB) [cirrocco.com] I was trying to find a way to add lightsaber effects to my videos without having to purchase Adobe products. So here's what I did:

      I shot the video and imported it into iMovie. (BTW, I'm using iMovie 2.03 on Mac OS 9.1) I exported it with the Sorenson codec after turning it into B&W (I thought it would be cool to have B&W video but a nice green-glowi

      • There are tons of free tools, filters, sounds etc. that can add to the things you can do w/iMove/iDVD. Your example is a good one.

        I'm in the middle of a 15 minute (iDVD) wedding DVD/video for some friends. They tell me these things go for $500.00. One job at that rate, would pay for DVD Studio Pro :)
        • Good luck to you! I hope it pays off!

          Keep in mind that iMovie (well, iMovie 2.0.3, anyway) can import only mp3's as sound files. BUT! There is the lame encoder and bladeenc. Lame is insanely fast on the command line (well, under Linux anyway) turning .wav's into mp3's, and there must be a .wav file for just about everything under the friggin' sun out there!

          So import your wav's to where your lame encoder is THEN import them into iMovie as mp3's.

          Say...I don't suppose you could point me in the direction of

  • The real missing manual (Score:5, Funny)

    by Reverend528 ( 585549 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @11:46AM (#6851166) Homepage
    man imovie man idvd
  • 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.

    • Your dad failed (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by Nurlman ( 448649 )
      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 sec
      • You're right, I forgot the next, and yes html gobbled my less than sign.
        That was over 20 years ago, so it's basically the equivelant of my grandma stating that all she got out of algebra was x=1 cow. ;-)
        Fortunately I got a lot more out of it than that.
        I lump my coding skills in with the same learning disability that seems to prevent me from really learning other languages. I can pick up a litle vocabulary, a little grammer, pronunciation is not problem at all, but there's no way that it all comes together i
  • Where's the chapter on homemade pr0n?

    Or does he know his audience?

  • 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 [bestwebbuys.com] by Pogue?

    • Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

      by scrod ( 136965 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @12:21PM (#6851393) Homepage
      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.

      Yeah, after he stopped writing for the back page of MacWorld he just kind of disappeared, huh? If only the New York Times [nytimes.com] were as prestigious a publication.
    • Yes, with the voice-operated missile tested with a live warhead, running on a macintosh quadra.

      a virus, written in 68k assembler, which was translated by something much like apple's macintosh application environment into something that automagically runs on ANY unix system!

  • IMovie (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @11:59AM (#6851255) Journal
    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.

    • Re 16:9 video, etc. (Score:3, Informative)

      by King_TJ ( 85913 )
      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 prope
    • Most apprec. I too have a Sony and shot some recent stuff in 16:9. At least I know it ain't gonna work with a i-stuff... :)
    • FWIW, Windows Movie Maker supports 16:9. I've done 16:9 from camcorder to MSWMM to TMpegEnc to DVD (via Sonic's MyDVD) and the results are quite nice (as long as you let TMpegEnc chew on the file for a long while).

    • Re:IMovie (Score:5, Informative)

      by DebianDog ( 472284 ) <dan&danslagle,com> on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @12:44PM (#6851666) Homepage
      Well while true to do "real" 16:9 editing you would at least need Final Cut Express [apple.com]. But you would also need a true 16:9 camera. The Sony widescreen (16:9 format) is doing nothing more than limiting the video written to tape and actually you have much LESS video (lines of resolution) You are just cropping off the top and bottom. I have a "true" 16:9 camera (Sony VX-2000) BUT to actually get it to use the whole tape (true widescreen) is like a $700 upgrade [tristatecamera.com] to the lens.

      You can get around your issue in iMovie by using a 16:9 effect for your transitions, titles, and effects. Available from both GeeThree [geethree.com] or Stupendous [stupendous-software.com] software, as iMovie will not alter the original DV you pulled off tape.

      MPEG is a touchy subject for Apple and I am sure it has to do something with the licensing. You will get one of the best MPEG encoder is you buy either Final Cut Pro or DVD Studio Pro. It is called Compressor [apple.com]. Quicktime will crop your video anyway you want just not output to MPEG-2 without the MPEG-2 codec.

      I think once you start figuring your Mac out you will be much happier and if you actually pay for professional results you will get them. If you are tenacious enough the are PLENTY of free MPEG encoder available on VersionTracker [versiontracker.com]. Here are the instructions [sjoki.uta.fi].

      --
      Daniel C. Slagle
      Keeper of the "Unofficial" iMovie FAQ [danslagle.com] [apple.com]
      Tell Apple how you feel about iMovie
    • Some references to help with 16:9 aspect:

      First Link [kenstone.net]

      Second Link [lafcpug.org]

    • Check out ffmpegX [mac.com]. It's a native OS X front end to some great Unix MPEG tools. It's got a number of pre-sets for export to VCD, SVCD, and DVD, and you can tweak to your heart's content. It'll read, directly, the .mov file produced by iMovie (I used to think I had to export to a self-contained .mov file, but the way iMovie / QuickTime allows for resource linking, you point it at the [small] native iMovie file and the tools do the work for you).

      w/r/t needing to spend an extra grand - you're referring to Fin

    • My experience has been similar to yours. Digital video is a pain to deal with on any platform and I was hoping OS X would help, but it didn't. iMovie was too limited to be useful and required far too much clicking around to get anything done and I couldn't get standard UNIX tools like dvgrab to work. And iMovie seemed to want to turn everything into some oddball formats.

      I just ended up installing Linux--it gives me far more video software, more powerful video software, and you can't beat the price.

      iMov

    • Re:IMovie (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Mods this is a troll or terribly mis-informed post, please moderate accordingly.

      1) The only Sony Handycam that supports "True" 16:9 is the DCR-PC330 and has yet to ship, check it out [image-acquire.com] so if you actually have this camera it would be interesting to find out how you acquired it. The other camera Sony sells that is in the palm camera format and does true 16:9 (not shoulder mounted) is the PDX10 which is ~US$3000.
      2) If you have a camera that does true 16:9 (which is a multi-thousand dollar camera) why are you
    • You may want to have a look at a quite reasonably priced program that does quite a lot: http://www.arboretum.com/products/hyperengine-av/ h av_main.html True, this is the designer of the product writing here but I don't think I am doing any harm in expressing my belief that HyperEngine-AV is a lot more straightforward, intuitive and fun to use than many other apps. out there. Since this my very first appearance on an online forum, by all means mister moderator do let me know if I am doing anything wrong

  • O'Reilly Annoyances (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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?

    • I think it was around the time Java came out. Certainly, 'Java in a nutshell' was a mountain of mediocrity. And that was about the time O'R started mixing in 'friendly' books, like the nutshell ones, with their classic books.

      Also, they strayed from their classic subjects -- Perl! Linux! Sockets! to make books about excel and .net and so on. A sound economic decision but it diluted the quality of the books -- I wouldn't even think of turning to O'Reilly first for a .NET book, and I probably wouldn't g
  • 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.
    • I agree--it's considerably slower than previous versions of iMovie and actually crashes quite a bit. Actually, saying that it's considerably slower is an understatement. The app is so slow you sometimes wonder if it's even aware of the fact that it's supposed to occasionally respond to user interface events. After trying to use iMovie 3 for even 5 minutes, iMovie 2 suddenly becomes a dream to use again. I suggest you revert to the old version.
  • It dosen't need it. I've been using Mac OS X for about 2 years now. None of these applications need a manual.
    • 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.
  • 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.
  • Thanks, Timothy, for an exceptionally well-done review. I accept both the praise and the constructive critiques.

    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

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