iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Chapter 13. Movies on the Web, the iPod, and the Phone

After editing your iMovie to perfection, you’ll want to show it to the world. Sure, you can preserve your work on videotape (Chapter 11) or CDs (Chapter 12); that’s fine if you want to make a handful of copies for a few friends.

But these days, all the cool kids are using electronics to distribute their masterpieces. They’re posting them online, for all of the Web to enjoy. They’re carrying videos around on the iPod, freed from the heavy tyranny of lugging around a laptop. And they’re even displaying these movies—in a tiny, jerky form—on their cellphones.

This chapter is designed to get your finished videos off the Mac and onto these un-tethered new platforms.

Make the Big Screen Tiny

The big time is the Internet. This billion-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.

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.