Chapter 15. QuickTime and the Web

On the surface, QuickTime is a great little utility for playing movies on your Mac. I often visit www.apple.com/trailers/ to see which new movie trailer is ready for download I click a link, and in a couple of minutes the clip is playing. (It's amazing what you can learn about filmmaking from trailers; they're some of the best sources for how to present ideas and images in a short time span.) Sometimes the movie appears in a window in your Web browser, while other times the QuickTime Player plays the movie.

Now, you have the opportunity to export your movies to the QuickTime format. In so doing, you gain a number of advantages: your file sizes become much smaller (a 1-minute clip can easily shrink from around 200 MB to 2 MB without destroying its quality); your movies can be played on any Macintosh sold within the last four or five years; and you can upload them to the Web, where anyone with a Web browser and the QuickTime software (that includes Windows users, too) can download and view the movie.

You can choose one of iMovie's recommended settings or configure the details yourself to tweak performance. And when it comes time to put the file on the Web, several methods are available, from building a mac.com Web page to hand-coding the HTML yourself.