Digital Video For Dummies

Digital Video for Dummies is a winner. It's a great guide to digital video production and one of the best-organized and most authoritative books in the Dummies series. Author Martin Doucette eloquently shares his experience in capturing moving images on videotape, converting the recorded images for editing on a personal computer, and manipulating them to yield maximum effect when presented to a viewer. Throughout, the book features the kind of advice only an experienced professional could deliver--stuff that will be extraordinarily valuable to anyone preparing digital video for use in a game, training aid, sales tool, Web site, or other multimedia genre.

Fully half of Digital Video for Dummies deals with motion-picture production values in general, computer editing and applications aside. Doucette explains how to script scenes, frame shots, capture sound, talk to actors, and apply makeup. He also demystifies camcorder technology--his fine explanation of white balance is one example of this book's excellent hardware coverage (which focuses on the Canon XL1 camera). Once he's explained how to get your scenes on tape, Doucette tells how to convert them to PC format. (He uses a Pinnacle Systems video capture card in his examples.) He uses Adobe's image- and video-editing software (especially Adobe Premiere 5.1 for Windows) in his tutorials, explaining how to get things done with a combination of numbered procedures, sharp prose, and succinct hints. The book's main shortcoming is its lack of information on producing and publishing streaming video in RealVideo or Windows Media Player format--after all, most Internet videos use one of those formats. But this isn't a Web book and it stands on its merits as a video-production and Adobe Premiere text. --David Wall

Topics covered: Preparing for video shoots, lighting, sound, scripting, capturing video to PC format, editing with Adobe Premiere, and adding effects with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects.