The Little Digital Video Book (Little Book) |
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Author:
Michael Rubin
By Peachpit Press
Average Customer Rating:   
List Price: £15.99
Our Price: £9.67
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 778.59
EAN: 9780321572622
ISBN: 0321572629
Label: Peachpit Press
Manufacturer: Peachpit Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: 2008-09-25
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Studio: Peachpit Press |
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Overpriced, out-of-date and inadequate, 2009-01-04
It is difficult to know who this book is aimed at. Anyone considering buying a camcorder for the first time would probably be well advised to read a suitable book first, ideally one that gave some advice as to what features to look for when making a choice of camera. This book fails to give such advice and, as the previous reviewer hinted at, it seems bizarrely to be aimed at someone with exactly the same kind of old-fashioned camcorder as the author. For a book that was published in the last quarter of 2008 it is inexcusably out of date, almost to the point of being quaint. I was left wondering whether the author has even set foot in a photography shop for the last few years. A few examples illustrate this. Firstly HDD camcorders, i.e. those using a hard disk drive as their primary storage facility, are mentioned almost in passing and as a possibility for the future, despite the fact that they are well and truly here, now, with HDDs of 40-60 Gb capacity being commonplace, and even around 120 Gb being readily available. Secondly, true high definition recording, its advantages and problems, are not dealt with, despite high definition camcorders being a major development recently. Thirdly, and perhaps most surprisingly, the book spends many pages suggesting how you should catalogue, label, file and store your collection of tapes. Tapes?? A newcomer to camcorders would have to really search for a recorder using tapes as even the most rudimentary budget camcorders now seem to record to either DVD or solid state memory devices.
There is some useful advice in the book regarding shooting and camera technique, but overall this small amount of sound advice does not make up for the book's inadequacies in other areas, and certainly does not justify a rather high price for a rather small book.
Was that all ??, 2002-10-22
First of all, the book is small. Ok I know we are talking about the basics, but still... The problem of course is not with the nulber of pages, but the way these are written. The book assumes you have not d8, not micro-MV but a mini-dv camera (in fact, suggests, in fact, urges you to buy one like the writer's) and proceeds to analyze which button you have to press depending what you want to do, and even gives you the exact label the button should have - all taken from the guy's XXXX brand camcorder. Ok I know some things are now standards, but not all cameras will have the function switch on the top/bottom/left/right side. Anyway, skipping that, the thing is that the books goes extremely slow in the beginning and too fast afterwards. It gives you too detailed instructions regarding how you should log your tapes and what reel names you should give them (not missing to explain WHY you should give those names) and the real interesting part of the book (shooting, names of different shots, description of coverage techniques, editing tips) are then described in a very few words, as if the guy didn't want to 'confuse' you with them :)
Anyway, it's not that I didn't learn a few new things (and I only had very few to do with shooting video , and a bit mpore with editing) but I would suggest another book, as this is 'not enough', since when it's really starting, it's finished.
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