I was fortunate to attend several sessions by the DMA people. Beth Corwin was awesome and I would love to attend one of their week-long “bootcamp” classes. They had 25 dual-boot iMacs set up for hands-on learning and they were lightening-fast 45 minute bare bones tutorials but they gave enough info to get you started with some great hints and tips thrown in.

I attended iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and Garageband as well as Flash 8 and Adobe Photoshop. I sat in on Motion as well. I learned after the first day to get signed up on their list as they had plenty of chairs but if you signed up you got to “drive” the computer. I will add more about some of the sessions later when I have had time to go over my notes and get what little I had time to take into a more coherent form but the best to me were the ones on Garageband and iDVD. We played a little with creating music in Garageband but also created our own short podcast and that was the part I was most interested in. We used loops for background music, recorded with the built-in microphone, added a few sound-effects and voila!

Mine was pretty lame but it was fun and not too terrible. I definitely would plan to script it if I was doing it for real but you can also edit within Garageband so you could delete any tracks you want to disappear. I discovered I can be just as nervous and giggly as high school girls having to record their French homework for the first time. It’s a whole new ballgame when it is you faced with the mic .