iMovie: The Missing Manual,
interview with David Pogue
MacCreator: Hello David,
As a creator in general, I am very excited about the possibilities of the iMac with iMovie, the first cheap film editing system launched upon the world ever. (And I can prove it. I wrote this article last year.)
Like often happens these days, this wonderful machine and software comes with everything but the electricity and the manual. But you have done something about that I hear?
David Pogue: Yes, the Missing Manual machine has done it again. "iMovie: The Missing Manual" has just been released, and, I'm happy to add, is doing wildly well. We went back to press for a second printing after only eight days!
MacCreator: Holy dang! Congratulations. So, do you provide the electricity too?
David Pogue: Electricity, humor, zip...any way you'd like to describe my writing is fine. :)
MacCreator: How on Earth do you go about writing a manual for a program that... er, doesn't have a manual? How do you work it out?
David Pogue: That's the tricky part. Books where there's absolutely nothing to go on -- no other books, no manuals, very little online help -- are my favorite challenge, but of course they take much longer to write than books about topics I already know well. I literally sit there for weeks on end, trying experiments, clicking and dragging, trying things on other Macs, and so on.
Fortunately, iMovie isn't the world's most complex program. But I still wanted to make the book complete with a full film making crash course, which involved hiring several technical advisers from film schools around the country.
MacCreator: I saw iMovie presented on Oprah. Oprah found it very hard to believe that a computer program might be easy to use. You have tons and tons of experience not only with programs, but working with users of all kinds of experience or lack of it. How easy or difficult is iMovie to use?
David Pogue: iMovie isn't difficult to use at all. The mission of this particular Missing Manual isn't to help you figure out the software -- it's to make you realize that this simple tool is about 100 times deeper and more capable than you ever imagined. Apple's online help is incredibly incomplete; for example, it documents only one of the three key editing maneuvers for trimming clips. It doesn't say anything about performing "video overlay," where you cut away to a new video shot while the audio track continues. It leaves gigantic holes in its discussion of titles and crossfades -- and naturally, it doesn't say a word about the secret Preferences document or using ResEdit to add new color choices to the Titles palette.
"iMovie: The Missing Manual," of course, goes into all of this.
MacCreator: Do you think iMovie changes a lot for creative people (as differentiated from people interested only in documenting something)?
David Pogue: Everything is changing in the world of video. Video is becoming a standard document format nowadays -- Realtors, doctors, lawyers, are using it, and it's popping up on plenty of Web sites. Until iMovie, the only programs that could edit digital video were $1,000 behemoth programs like Final Cut. Because iMovie is so fast and simple, even professionals have started to use it for quick, fast digitizing and rough editing before moving into the high-priced programs.
Another goal of iMovie: The Missing Manual" was making people realize all this -- that video is no longer out of reach. You can use it for home movies, of course, but that's really only the beginning. People are making "living photo albums" with it, becoming event videographers with it, creating training materials with it, and telling stories with it -- don't forget that "The Blair Witch Project" was made with a camcorder, too.
MacCreator: What is the biggest differences between working with ordinary home video and working with digital video and iMovie?
David Pogue: I remember being incredibly upset to read in the 1980s, in a New York Times article, that regular videotape begins to deteriorate after only 10 years. All of your precious footage is doomed. And you can't save it by copying it to a fresh tape after a few years, either, because of the nature of VHS tape: each copy is a horrible distortion of the one that came before it. There was no solution.
Digital video changes everything. Your tapes will still begin to deteriorate after ten years, but now you won't care. Now you can transfer the signal onto fresh tapes with no deterioration -- over and over and over again, until your grandchildren are watching it.
There are many other advantages -- 500 lines of resolution instead of 240 for ordinary VHS, for example, and the ease of editing on the Mac -- but for me, the notion that DV signals are forever is the most persuasive one.
MacCreator: But iMovie is only a very basic version of a full-blown film editing package like Apple's own Final Cut Pro. What limitations should a future film artist expect from this?
David Pogue: iMovie has no special effects, such as picture-in-picture or video playing through lettering (thank God, I say). It doesn't let you do the video inserts I mentioned earlier -- at least not without the workaround provided in the book. It offers no method of adjusting the volume level of an audio clip along its length. It doesn't let you separate the audio track from the video. And it offers no clip video adjustments, such as brightness or contrast. All of these are standard features in professional editing software. And all of them, frankly, are unnecessary in 85 percent of the video projects most people do!
MacCreator: What would make the difference for the average person working with iMovie with or without your book?
David Pogue: Without the book, you won't really understand what's going on with your video. You may not be able to make your camcorder work properly with iMovie. You won't come anywhere near being able to get the most out of the program, because you won't even know about half of its features.
More important, you'll miss out on the film-technique chapters, which teach lighting, sound, framing, composition, and editing techniques the way the Hollywood pros do it. It's not overkill even for home movies to give some consideration to these issues -- you can't believe how good your finished work will look if you take just a few precautions before you shoot.
MacCreator: How about publishing? Video tape, I wouldn't know how to get that produced, and it seems rather... dated, I guess. Do you know if one can get DVDs made for reasonable money?
David Pogue: The final third of the book is dedicated to answer the question, "What do I do with my movie when I'm finished with it?" That includes step-by-step instructions for exporting it as a QuickTime movie, creating a video CD, or even burning a DVD!
In fact, there's even a chapter on posting your QuickTime movies so that they play on your Web page; I even give you the actual HTML codes necessary to do that.
After all, making a movie is only half the battle -- then you have to find its audience!
MacCreator: How about the Internet? Isn't that too slow for video distribution yet?
David Pogue: If you keep the movie pretty small, and keep the frame rate very low, it's workable. Thanks to QuickTime, even people with a dial-up phone line get smooth motion, even if they have to wait a minute or two before it starts. You can see one example on my own home page, of a 10-second iMovie that works just this way.
(MacCreator: Check it out, it is really funny.)
MacCreator: Any roundup advice to people who want to make films with iMovie (besides getting your book)?
David Pogue: For the first time, what you filmed isn't what you'll be showing your friends -- now you can capture more great moments, you can film more freely, because you'll know that it's so easy to cut out the boring parts before anybody ever sees the footage. That's just one way that iMovie, in its quiet way, changes everything.
To buy iMovie, The Missing Manual
Visit the Missing Manual site.
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