The Avid Digital Editing Room Handbook

Written in a clear and concise style, The Avid Digital Editing Room Handbook is a excellent guide for anyone manipulating video or feature films on an Avid nonlinear editing system. The book best serves experienced editors who want to understand and use an Avid system and refrains from addressing editing philosophies or principles.

Although this handbook opens with very basic explanations of Avid and Mac hardware, it quickly advances into the process of logging dailies and organizing your project. Comparisons are made between celluloid and digital editing, and how to store and share media. There are also excellent chapters on how the hardware works, what options are available, and preventive maintenance.

This is a valuable and handy reference book, and it's designed to be kept close at hand as you work. It would have been a bit more useful with a spiral binding, enabling it to lie flat on the desk. And though it includes a fair number of illustrations, handbooks of this complexity and depth could always benefit from a larger number of illustrations and screen shots. A minimum of space is given to the built-in titling tools, and nothing is mentioned of the special effects or keying tools.

Anyone cutting on an Avid, whether a novice or an experienced editor, always has questions about procedures, techniques, and hardware; this is the book to turn to for the answers. --Mike Caputo