iMovie 4 & iDVD: The Missing Manual (Missing Manuals)

You may not have paused (a pun!) to think about it, but we"re living in the golden age of home movies. Forget dad"s old Super-8 films and the stinky celluloid in grandma"s basement: A reasonably priced digital video camera and a Macintosh computer give you the ability to not only record moving images, but modify and assemble them in order to tell stories more effectively than ever. David Pogue, Mac maven, shows you how to make movies using iMovie and iDVD, the video editing and burning software that ship with all modern iMacs. iMovie and iDVD: The Missing Manual documents its two eponymous programs fully, but without straying from the tone of lighthearted competence that characterizes Pogue"s best work. This book includes plenty of nods to total Mac novices--the author explains such terms as resolution and pixel--but appeals as well to competent Mac users who just happen not to be cinamatographers. Obvious stuff that authors often neglect--such as the approximate disk-space requirements of movies of various lengths--appears in this book. Plus, Pogue makes extensive use of a question-and-answer format (particularly in sidebars) that"s simultaneously easy to read and extraordinarily fact-dense. This is the book you need if you"re planning to do any video work with an iMac. --David Wall Topics covered: How to use Apple iMovie and iDVD to record, edit, and publish digital video. It"s a soup-to-nuts treatment, covering selection of a camera, filming (including lighting and composition), assembling clips into a meaningful narrative, adding special effects and titles, and burning the product to DVD for distribution.