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Rating: 
Summary: good teaching tool, but?
Review: Mr. Cartwright's book is a excellent teaching text for high school or college students studying video and multimedia production. It does a great job of taking the beginner through all of the steps needed to ensure a successful production. However, one can't help overlook that a text written four years ago on this subject is LONG overdue for a new edition. Many software applications that are referred to as "soon to be released" are now in their 3rd or 4th version. Likewise, the hardware section of the book is terribly behind the times, as their is virtually no mention of digital video cameras, digital capture cards, current generation non-linear editing systems, or DVD. Also disappointing was the 3.5" disc that's included, which contains all of the forms in the book. The disc is specially formatted so that it cannot be read on a Macintosh-which CAN read any commonly formatted PC diskette! Instead the publisher encourages Mac users to send in the PC disk and receive a Mac disk at no charge. Why not just use the standard 1.4mb formatting for a PC disk and let users of either platform access the material? Or better yet, just put the forms on a hybrid CD-ROM. This is especially irksome to Mac devotees, when practically all of the computers pictured in the book doing video editing are Macs! Yet, despite its need for a new edition to address the latest and greatest in hardware and software, and its platform specific floppy, Pre-Production and Planning for Video, Film and Multimedia will serve as a valuable resource for those new to the pre and post production arena, as much of the planning and organizational approaches in the text never go out of style!
Rating:
Summary: good teaching tool, but¿
Review: Mr. Cartwright's book is a excellent teaching text for high school or college students studying video and multimedia production. It does a great job of taking the beginner through all of the steps needed to ensure a successful production. However, one can't help overlook that a text written four years ago on this subject is LONG overdue for a new edition. Many software applications that are referred to as "soon to be released" are now in their 3rd or 4th version. Likewise, the hardware section of the book is terribly behind the times, as their is virtually no mention of digital video cameras, digital capture cards, current generation non-linear editing systems, or DVD. Also disappointing was the 3.5" disc that's included, which contains all of the forms in the book. The disc is specially formatted so that it cannot be read on a Macintosh-which CAN read any commonly formatted PC diskette! Instead the publisher encourages Mac users to send in the PC disk and receive a Mac disk at no charge. Why not just use the standard 1.4mb formatting for a PC disk and let users of either platform access the material? Or better yet, just put the forms on a hybrid CD-ROM. This is especially irksome to Mac devotees, when practically all of the computers pictured in the book doing video editing are Macs! Yet, despite its need for a new edition to address the latest and greatest in hardware and software, and its platform specific floppy, Pre-Production and Planning for Video, Film and Multimedia will serve as a valuable resource for those new to the pre and post production arena, as much of the planning and organizational approaches in the text never go out of style!
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