iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Posting Movies on the Web

After editing your iMovie to perfection, you’ll want to show it to the world. Sure, you can preserve your work on videotape, or save it as a DVD; that’s fine if you want to make a handful of copies for a few friends.

But the big time is the Internet. This 400-million-seat megaplex is where the action is, where unknown independent filmmakers get noticed, and where it doesn’t cost you a penny to distribute your work to a vast worldwide audience.

All of the techniques described in this section assume that you’ve exported your iMovie production as a QuickTime movie.

Now, you could post your 24-frames-per-second, 640 x 480, stereo-CD-quality sound motion picture on your Web page. But you’d have to include instructions that say, “Please download my movie! It’s only 2 GB—about five days of continuous downloading with a 56 K modem. But trust me, it’s worth the wait!”

A vast audience still connects to the Internet using an ordinary telephone-line modem, such as a 28.8 K or 56 K model. These modems receive data very slowly, so they’re not very well equipped for receiving video from the Internet.

If you expect anyone to actually watch your movies, therefore, you, like thousands of Internet movie-makers before you, will have to make your Web-based movies tiny. To make your movie watchable by people with telephone-line modems, use the Web setting described on page 392.

If the need to downsize your movie like this doesn’t crush your artistic pride, the worst is over. Here, ...