With YouTube and Google Video receiving millions and millions of vistors, and websites like England's 18 Doughty Street blurring the line between television and the web, Internet video went from zero to 100 MPH in little more than a year. And a lot of people still on the sidelines are wondering how to get into the game.

When dealing with Internet video, the video aspect needs to come first — or as we used to say in school when coding our Altair 8080: garbage in = garbage out. Three recent books provide a good introduction to that half of the medium: 500 Digital Video Hints, Tips And Techniques by Rob Hull and Jamie Ewbank, Setting Up Your Shots, by Jeremy Vinyard and illustrated by Jose Cruz, and Placing Shadows by Chuck Gloman and Tom Letourneau.

And that's a good order to read them in. 500 Digital Video Hints, Tips And Techniques is a fine introduction to the very basics of digital video. If you've purchased a camcorder to shoot Christmas and birthday parties and then want to create something more, or just improve the basic appearance of your videos, this is the book for you. Heavily illustrated, it will walk you through the various camera types available (even capturing video on a cell phone) all the way to editing your video with a program like Adobe Premiere (or its little brother, Premiere Elements).

Not Just For Video Makers

The subhead of Setting Up Your Shots is "Great Camera Moves Every Filmmaker Should Know". It's 123 pages of storyboard-style illustrations that demonstrate a number of camera moves as well as listing the films that best show them off. The book is designed to appeal to newbie independent fictional movie makers, but there's a still a wealth of tips for the documentarian. (Or tyro rock video maker, for that matter.) And while some of the shots may be impractical on a low budget (obvious examples being helicopter and crane shots), there are lots of tips here to get your creative juices flowing. And not just compositions and camera moves: novel editing and scene transitions are listed as well.

Of the three books listed here, Setting Up Your Shots is also recommended to someone who has absolutely no interest in DIY video, but wants to learn more about how film and TV shows are put together. While there will always be an innovative filmmaker who pushes the creative envelope, many, many projects use nothing but very tried and true cinematic techniques to tell their stories, and you'll see the majority of them discussed here.