iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Where to Get Help Online

You can get personal iMovie help by calling Apple’s help line at [phone] for 90 days after you bought the iLife DVD or a new Mac. (Technically, you can call within the first 90 days of ownership, but the clock really doesn’t start until your first call.) After that, you can either buy an AppleCare contract for another year of tech-support calls ($170 to $350, depending on your Mac model), or pay $50 per individual call!

Beyond 90 days, however, consider consulting the Internet, which is filled with superb sources of fast, free technical help. Here are some of the best places to get your questions answered:

• Apple’s own iMovie discussion forum. Here, you can read user comments, ask questions of knowledgeable users, or hang out and learn good stuff (http://discussions.info.apple.com).

• MacDV List. This outstanding resource is a mailing list, which is like a public bulletin board, except that each message is emailed to everybody who has signed up for the list. To post a message yourself, you just email it to a central address. It’s attended by both iMovie fans and Final Cut Pro users (see Chapter 15), but the group tolerates both beginner and advanced questions.

  You sign up for this free feature at http://www.themacintoshguy.com/lists. Note that you can sign up either for the one-message-at-a-time membership, which sends about 20 messages a day to your email box, or for the Digest version, in which you get just one email each day containing all of the day’s ...