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(4.5 out of 5)
Have you ever wanted to know how to put together a really professional-looking movie with your iMac? Sure, Apple provides the software to 'make it easy', but giving someone a really nice hammer won't teach him how to make a house. But once you go through DVCreators.net's Making Awesome iMovies, you will be practically bursting to go get your friends together and make an awesome iMovie.
Making Awesome iMovies is split up into 4 different episodes: Preproduction, Production, Postproduction, and Delivery. Despite the fact that the name of the last one doesn't fit in quite as well as the others, it's a great layout. It comes packaged as a single CD-ROM that you pop in your computer and watch as an interactive QuickTime movie. Although it is not a Mac OS X-native application, it runs just fine in Classic mode.
In Preproduction, you learn about how to plan for your movie: brainstorming, writing the script, and making your own storyboard with illustrations and technical notes. The suggestions contained in this section set your movie on track, and help prevent problems from coming up later on.
The second part is Production, where you learn how to actually film your movie. MAI guides you through camera operation (including what all those controls like exposure, white balance, and shutter speed really mean), camera aesthetics (when and how to zoom, pan, etc.), proper lighting and audio, and behind the scenes. This whole section was pretty eye-opening to me, I learned a lot.
Before Digital Video came along, people making home movies had to either shoot their movies so that there was no scene-clipping afterwards, or have some sort of two-VCR setup that often had a low-quality end result. No more. With iMovie, you can take your video clips, rearrange them how you like, clip them to the desired length, and add transitions, special effects, music, and sound effects with zero quality loss. Making Awesome iMovies shows exactly how to effectively edit your video, as if you were looking over the shoulder of a pro with a low budget.
And finally, you learn delivery methods for your awesome iMovie. MAI gives the basics of putting your masterpiece on VHS tape, CD-ROM, DVD, and the internet. They even have detailed suggestions on the compression settings for the QuickTime Export dialog.
Making Awesome iMovies is great. An easy, fun style made me watch the entire thing in one sitting (it was a few hours long), and as you went through you got to watch them make an awesome iMovie. And at the end you finally get to see it - a cute movie entitled "The Disappearing Ink Story". We'll let your imagination figure how it turns out.
Whether or not you have done any dabbling in video, Making Awesome iMovies can really help strengthen you in several areas. I learned a lot. You can too. Making Awesome iMovies is available online at dvcreators.net.
David Norton is in the process of acquiring a DV Camera. At the moment, he borrows a buddy's when he gets in a Hitchcockish mood.
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