The state of magic is in a perculeure place right now it is moving from people buying books on magic to buying DVDS. I Know that lots of you are going to hate me for this but this is my opinion.

Today All I ever here or see are young magicians everywhere not just here on the penguin magic forum but at my own magic mettings ( Ring 76 ) Many of the younger magicians seem to to be drawn to the mystic aura of magic DVDs. I have purchased and recieved many DVDs before making up my mind 2 out of the 10 DVDs that I have I acctually find to be very good. On the spot and liquid metal Liquid metal is better suited to a DVD because Morgan needed to show the mechanics whitch would have been difficult to explain and understant in a book. For example, the best coin DVD, Revolutionary coin magic , is 30 dollars and teaches many tricks 35 to be exact and Bobos modern Coin magic book is 10 dollars and comes with better discripions of all of the tricks slights and has more knowledge and is very good the bettter deal is the book. Born to perform now I have this DVD and I bought Card Colledge and compared to CC BTP is a piece of Crap. The slights are indespencible I learned all the slights and more from these books. Althought they are more expensive they have way more value.

DVDs are also are harder to perform with your own style. After watching pyrotechnich pasteboards and seeing Greg say the same lines over and over again they become inplanted in your brain you will even start to mimmick him if you read a book it may suggest lines here and their but if you form the lines to your own perssonallity then the performance would be more interesting.

If you were going to perform the Vernon cups and balls exactly like vernon. The routine would be horrible. When Vernon Did the cups and balls he did them flawlessly but it wasnt his flawless technique that made his cups and balls so great it was because he was vernon. Even if you were to perform the cups and balls exactly like vernon you are not vernon.

Now aday any person can go to the mall and pick up Micheal ammars easy to master seiries. He'll think that it is "cool" and he'll buy it maybe do 2 hours of practice , if not less and then he will perform it 1 or twice the DVD has many pricless magic gems that were found in old dusty magic books magizines and pamplets . But any guy with fourty dollars can buy it and waist it. I have even seen these DVDs at Disney land. I have seen penguinmagic products with the actuall brand PENGUINMAGIC right on the box.

Thats my thought about DVDS and why books are better.

I have never said myself personally anywhere that books or DVDs are better, I have said that both are good for different kinds of reasons. I do agree with your essay, it all entirely depends on what you wish to be taught, taking that into consideration you choose the best source to be taught, that can either be a book or DVD. I still believe however that a book can go much more in depth, but on the other hand it does not offer the viualness a DVD has to offer. Both have something different to offer.
j

Good essay, although I do not totally agree. I think whether a person likes DVDs or books better is dependant solely on the person. I for one find that actually watching someone do it & tell how to do it is much easier to learn than looking at illustrations & having to read it & learn. I have read royal road to card magic, I found it very hard to learn. Now, I will still pick up CC in due time. But, I still like to learn from DVDs, I have already ordered J.B. Bobo's modern coin magic & Revolutionary coin magic both. The book will teach me some stuff. But, because of my style of learning, I will learn better from the DVD.

Books > DVDs.

'tis true.

also I would think that DVDs are better if you are a flourisher or a XCMer thing

I really don't understand the problem about learning magic from whatever source you happen to like better.


I enjoy DVD's better because I get to see the effect perfromed. I can learn from books, too, but I like DVD's better (ID's included).

As Greg Wilson said in one of his DVD's... Don't just stick with this DVD, this DVD is only meant to be the visual and performance side of the tricks and or sleights, buy books as a suppliment to these DVD's as they go in further detail of the explanations... All of Gregs DVD's I have are fantastic! He is an amazing magician... go buy one of his DVD's and the Card College series and your set! (If your into card magic that is!)

If it is a good book, it is a good buy.
If you can picture the movement in your head and you understand it, its a good buy, you get more for your money in books though.

You have a good point in your text BUT, DVDs are part of development. That is just a fact. It is a new way of learning. Compare it to reading normal books and wachting a film. There is a very big defference here and it is very hard to comperathem just because they are sooo different.

I will not say that one is better than the other. They both work in different ways so let it stay there. Don't start comparing them. Also people have different ways of learning, from books or from DVDs. It is just like some like to read boooks and some like to watch movies.

To conclude, what you said about being original. Yes, you can be original when learning from a dvd. The advantage here is that you have been given some good infromation to show you the way. You don't have to follow excactly what the magician in the dvds do, but this might help you and make you concentrate more on technique than patter. Then when you have the technique down you can make the patter the way you want.

I think it was Richard Osterlind who said that the best way to be original is to learn an effect and all the slights well. Write down all the slights and nothing more. Then rest with the effect for a week or two and go back and start with it again, but now think about it as your own effect. Then come up with new presentation and patter and maybe a new twist. I myself work this way and have had very good results.

Wow, that was a long conclusion...

//Christian

I think that a frequent problem with DVDs (it doesn't seem to be so prevalent with books) is that, rather than giving the viewer some different performance ideas, you get a single performance, which encourages the viewer to perform an effect exactly as the performer on the DVD showed it.

Nobody can say one way to learn is better than another.

And the amount of information and material on DVDs is entirely up to the DVD publisher. You can fit hours upon hours of film on a single DVD. However most publishers shy out just over an hour, and make you purchase volume 2, 3, and 4.

It's all about making money, and at the same time, keeping customers happy with the amount of information on the DVD.

At this point in time, the publishers haven't ponied up and supplied mass amounts of info on the DVDs. One day they hopefully will.

We can hope. The potential is amazing. You could have short looping film of the crucial moves, you could have historical background, alternative presentations, and masses of supporting text.

I just thought of an additional plus point for books: I can read them in the bathroom!

Portable DVD players are pretty cheap these days.

That's true! What I'd like to see more of is essentially a book (i.e. plenty of text) with film clips of the crucial moves, which are often difficult to portray adequately, even with good illustrations.

I believe there's a CD-ROM version of card college that includes film clips. That sounds like a step in the right direction.

Even a book with web site logins to log in and download clips of the moves.