This is one of the most informative Final Cut Pro books that I own. It's a great reference for me because not only was I looking to raise the aesthetic value of my work, but I also had some lingering questions that were answered. I learned from this book and feel that it was money well spent.

When looking for a Final Cut Pro book I didn't want to read a book that was a fundamental introduction to the software or a book written like an operational manual. I wanted to edit a music video with some attention-grabbing effects and not have to rummage around the internet and through various books to get ideas on how to do so. Let me be the first to say that this is a new breed of FCP book that shows you how to do the cool stuff. This book is great for someone who wants their work to appear as if it were edited by a seasoned pro and not so great for someone who wants a dry list of button functions. I will say that the capturing section of the book does clarify many of the problems people have during the capture process by explaining functionality in a more practical sense.

I thought this book would be more in depth but the book is actually more for the mid-level person. There are many things this this book does not go into, the most important (for me) is multicamera editing is missing from this book. There are books that are three times as thick as this one that don't cover it all. I gave it three stars because it was missing a few of the fundamentals that I wanted to learn. I like the book though and I did learn some things though.

I tore thru this book in about 4 days from start to finish and it was OUTSTANDING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Lynda.com training is good, but if more booka and tutorials could follow this books example many of us would be pros in a shorter amount of time.

Lonzell Watson (Writer of the book)...YOU ARE A WONDERFUL PERSON TO SHARE SO MUCH PASSION AND INSIGHT!!
THANK YOU!!!!!

First off I want to say that this is a fantastic book. It's not only an invaluable reference, it's also great for Final Cut newbies. Though newbies should have some basic knowledge of digital editing. But not as much as the subtitle "For Digital Video Editors Only" suggests. I think that subtitle may prevent other newbies from taking a good look at this book. What I love about this book is that you really hit the ground running, thanks to the DVD project files included. And what I also love is that the book just shows you one or two ways to achieve a desired result as opposed to the Final Cut manual which shows you literally dozens of ways of achieving the same thing. That can be daunting and overwhelming. So just use the manual for secondary reference and get this book. My only complaints are this. The book is organizes kind of weird, the author admits that it's organized atypically, and that's fine, but I think some key things should be moved around. The final chapter in the book is about the included DVD, however, if you've gotten that far into the book, you've already use the DVD. The problem with this is that no where in the beginning does it say to copy the DVD files onto your hard disc so I was having obvious difficulty trying to do the exercises off the disc. But in the final chapter it recommends doing that. There should be some kind of note at the beginning to do just that. Also, the book came out in 2008, yet it's still giving you instructions per Tiger (not Leopard) and it still occasionally references the Apple key which has been changed for almost a year to the Command Key. Like many people I switched to Mac because of Leopard, so it took me a few phone calls to friends to figure this all out. My only other issue is that some descriptions in the book are too brief. All the info is there, but often I'd have to read a paragraph a couple of times to really get something. But as the title of this review states, these are minor quibbles to a fantastic book that will have you editing like a pro in no time.

Initially I started this book and learned some things right away that I hadn't realized. Then the direction of the book seemed to jump around a bit and in the process I found sections that weren't formatted properly and in one section (pgs.60-61) the author refers to an project file that doesn't exist. In other parts you wonder what one thing has to do with the exercise just given. On page 67 it jumps from finding a particular clip within a sequence to placing markers for DVD Studio Pro.
If the book is used in a process where you check for something in the index then jump to that page, it should work out fine, but as a linear read, it really is scattered.