About This Book | iMovie HD & iDVD 5: The Missing Manual

Don't let the rumors fool you. iMovie may be simple, but it isn't simplistic. It offers a wide range of special effects and flexible features for creating transitions between scenes, superimposing text on your video, layering multiple soundtracks together, and more. Unfortunately, many of the best techniques aren't covered in the only "manual" you get with iMovieits electronic help screens.

This book was born to address three needs. First, it's designed to give you a grounding in professional filming and editing techniques. The camcorder and iMovie produce video of stunning visual and audio quality, giving you the technical tools to produce amazing videos . But most people don't have much experience with the artistic side of shootinglighting, sound, and compositionor even how to use the dozens of buttons packed onto the modern camcorder. This book will tell you all you need to know.

Second, this book is designed to serve as the iMovie manual, as the book that should have been in the box. It explores each iMovie feature in depth, offers illustrated catalogs of the various title and transition effects, offers shortcuts and work arounds, and unearths features that the online help doesn't even mention.

Finally, this book comes with a free bonus book: iDVD5: The Missing Manual, which constitutes Chapters 15, 16, 17, and 18.If your Mac has a DVD burner like Apple's SuperDrive, iDVD can preserve your movies on home-recorded DVDs that look and behave amazingly close to the commercial DVDs you rent from Netflix or Blockbuster.

About the Outline

iMovie HD & iDVD 5: The Missing Manual is divided into five parts , each containing several chapters:

Part 1, Capturing DV Footage, covers what happens before you get to iMovie. It explains the DV format, helps you buy and learn to use a camcorder, and offers a crash course in professional film technique.
Part 2, Editing in iMovie, is the heart of the book. It leads you through transferring your footage into iMovie, editing your clips, placing them into a timeline, adding cross fades and titles, working with your soundtracks, and more.
Part 3, Finding Your Audience, helps you take the cinematic masterpiece on your screen to the world. Even if you don't have the necessary gear to burn your work onto DVD, iMovie excels at exporting your work in two different ways: back to your camcorder (from which you can play it on TV, transfer it to your VCR, and so on) or to a QuickTime movie file (which you can burn onto a CD, post on a Web page, or send to friends by email). This part of the book offers step-by-step instructions for each of these methods , and also shows you how you can use QuickTime Player Pro to supplement the editing tools in iMovie.
Part 4, iDVD 5: The Missing Manual, is just what you'd expect: a bonus volume dedicated to the world's easiest -to-use DVD design and burning software, written by guest author (and bestselling digital-video goddess) Erica Sadun. It goes way, way beyond the basics, as you'll see.

At the end of the book, three appendixes provide a menu-by-menu explanation of the iMovie menu commands, a comprehensive troubleshooting handbook, and a new master cheat sheet of iMovie's keyboard shortcuts.

About These Arrows

Throughout this book, and throughout the Missing Manual series, you'll find sentences like this one: " Open your Home Library Preferences folder." Thats shorthand for a much longer instruction that directs you to open three nested folders in sequence, like this: "In the Finder, choose Go Home. In your Home folder, youll find a folder called Library. Open that. Inside the Library window is a folder called Preferences. Double-click to open it, too."

Similarly, this kind of arrow shorthand helps to simplify the business of choosing commands in menus , as shown in Figure I-1.

Figure I-1. In this book, arrow notations help to simplify folder and menu instructions. For example, "Choose Dock Position on Left is a more compact way of saying, "From the menu, choose Dock; from the submenu that then appears, choose Position on Left," as shown here.

Technical Notes for PAL People

If you live in the Americas, Japan, or any of 30 other countries , your camcorder, VCR, and TV record and play back a video signal in a format that's known as NTSC. Even if you've never heard the term , every camcorder, VCR, TV, and TV station in your country uses this same signal. (The following discussion doesn't apply to high-definition video, which is the same across continents.)

What it stands for is National Television Standards Committee, the gang who designed this format. What it means is incompatibility with the second most popular format, which is called PAL (Phase Alternating Line, for the curious ). In Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, and China (among other places), everyone's equipment uses the PAL format. You can't play an American tape on a standard VCR in Swedenunless you're happy with black-and-white, sometimes jittery playback.

Tip: France, the former Soviet Union countries, and a few others use a third format, known as SECAM. iMovie doesn't work with SECAM gear. To find out what kind of gear your country uses, visit a Web site like www.vidpro.org/standards.htm.

Fortunately, iMovie converses fluently with both NTSC and PAL camcorders. When you launch the program, it automatically studies the camcorder you've attached and determines its format. (And if it detects wrong, you can tell it what kind of gear you have by choosing iMovie Preferences and clicking either NTSC or PAL.)

However, most of the discussions in this book use NTSC terminology. If you're a friend of PAL, use the following information to translate this book's discussions.

The Tech Specs of NTSC

Whether you're aware of it or not, using the NTSC standard-definition format means that the picture you see is characterized like this:

30 frames per second. A frame is one individual picture. Flashed before your eyes at this speed, the still images blend into what you perceive as smooth motion.
575 scan lines. The electron gun in a TV tube paints the screen with this number of fine horizontal lines.
The DV picture measures 720 x 480 pixels. This figure refers to the number of screen dots, or pixels, that compose one frame of image in the DV (digital video) version of the NTSC format. (But don't count on these specs if your intention is to crop photos or graphics to just that size , thinking that they'll fit neatly. They won't, as described on page 249.)

The Tech Specs of PAL

When iMovie detects a PAL camcorder (or when you inform it that you're using one), it makes the necessary adjustments automatically, including:

25 frames per second. Video fans claim that the lower frame rate creates more flicker than the NTSC standard. On the other hand, this frame rate is very close to the frame rate of Hollywood films (24 frames per second). As a result, many independent filmmakers find PAL a better choice when shooting movies they intend to convert to film.
625 scan lines. That's 20 percent sharper and more detailed than NTSC. The difference is especially visible on large-screen TVs.
The DV picture measures 720 x 576 pixels. This information may affect you as you read Chapter 9 and prepare still images for use with iMovie.

About MissingManuals.com

At www.missingmanuals.com, you'll find news, articles, and updates to the books in this series.

But if you click the name of this book and then the Errata link, you'll find a unique resource: a list of corrections and updates that have been made in successive printings of this book. You can mark important corrections right into your own copy of the book, if you like.

In fact, the same page offers an invitation for you to submit such corrections and updates yourself. In an effort to keep the book as up to date and accurate as possible, each time we print more copies of this book, we'll make any confirmed corrections you've suggested. Thanks in advance for reporting any glitches you find!

In the meantime, we'd love to hear your suggestions for new books in the Missing Manual line. There's a place for that on the Web site, too, as well as a place to sign up for free email notification of new titles in the series.