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BOOK REVIEWS
January 2004

Down & Out In The Magic Kingdom
Review by A. David Cooper

Known in many circles as a premier technologist, a member of the West Coast technocracy, and the editor of the online digital culture zine "BoingBoing," Cory Doctorow has taken his well-known obsession with all things Disney and made it into a science fiction novel. "Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom" by Cory Doctorow details the intertwined lives of a group of humans who live at Disneyland and practice life extension through cloning.

Essentially, if you trip, fall and crack your head open, catch the plague, or simply get murdered by a spurned lover, you can instantly have a new body replicated, and your old memories are downloaded into your new skin suit. Updating your "mind file" happens regularly, and much importance is put upon regularly "backing up your hard drive" lest you die and have to come back to life with a memory sporting a year-long gap.

The hard science of the story is interesting in its combination of meatspace dabbling and digital magic, but the real drama of Down And Out happens between the main characters involved in a love triangle, and a Bill Gatesian female villain who would make Machiavelli look like an old world punk. Reeking of the world-weary protagonists who populate Bruce Sterling's cyberpunk tomes, Doctorow's hero finds himself teetering between his devotion to the old school analog magic of Disneyland, and a new world of virtual amusement park rides that, for him, sap the very life energy of Disneyland from its fantastic dream factory exoskeleton of steel and plastic. In this, Doctorow's character seems traced closely along the edges of the author himself.

Despite naysayers who bemoan Doctorow's Disney fixation, within the novel, the construct actually serves as a poignant shadow protagonist able to tacitly say what the characters often cannot. Disney was supposed to be America's future: Epcot Center, Space Mountain, and Mickey Mouse on the moon. But the reality of our future is more designer drugs, body modification, and extropian life extension hacks. The real future is nothing Walt Disney would have served up at his theme parks. And this juxtaposition in Doctorow's novel, Disney versus the ugly truth, is what becomes the real heart of Down And Out. You can download Down And Out for free online (www.boingboing.com), or go old school and buy it at your local bookstore. Either way, it's a great ride.

Publisher: Tor Books > Price: $22.95
www.craphound.com

Apple Pro Training Series - Final Cut Pro 4
Review by Ric Getter

Even though you hear professional editors raving about Final Cut Pro, saying it's intuitive and easy to use, you'll discover they are speaking only in a comparative sense. If you're new to editing, or even an experienced tape editor just breaking into nonlinear systems, you have a lot of learning ahead of you.

Thanks to Diana Weynand's contribution to the Apple Pro Training Series, you stand a good chance of surviving the transition into this new, high-tech tool. It is, in fact, one of the most thorough and consistently clear technical tutorials of any sort we've seen. It compares very favorably with Adobe's "Classroom in a Book" series, which, we have found, occasionally sacrifices clarity for the sake of brevity.

The sheer bulk of the book (over 800 pages) may put some people off. But it doesn't take too many pages to learn the reason for the size. A good teacher doesn't rush. Weynand takes the time to go over the techniques you'll need to understand in order to use the program efficiently and effectively. One of the most pleasing aspects of the book is the sample project you're given to work on - a nature documentary full of beautiful, professional footage. That really makes the lessons memorable. The footage and project files are included on the accompanying 3.7 GB DVD-ROM.

Each chapter has its own project file, which makes this book/tutorial useful even to experienced editors. If you're already familiar with the basics, but need to get up to speed on an unfamiliar technique, just work through the relevant chapters. The title page of each chapter tells you the time you can expect to spend and the goals you can expect to achieve. Each project opens both the starting and final versions of the sequence you'll be working on, making it easy to check your work as you go along. The conclusion of each chapter includes a brief review and a list of the useful shortcuts. The author obviously has a solid grasp of instruction design.

The book is logically organized, starting off with the important elements of the Final Cut interface and moving on to the basic edits. Two full chapters are dedicated to trimming techniques, one of the least intuitive aspects of any nonlinear editing system. The book also covers the three new Final Cut 4 applications including Soundtrack, LiveType and Compressor.

Considering its size, completeness and the amount of video content it includes, the book is a remarkably good value. It can take years to become a skilled editor, but it doesn't have to take nearly as long to learn how to use your editing program.

Publisher: Peachpit Press > Price: $44.99
Pages: 856 > www.peachpit.com