Section 19.4. Posting Movies on the Web | iLife 05: The Missing Manual

19.4. 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, CDs, or DVDs; that's fine if you want to make a handful of copies for a few friends .

But the big time is the Internet. This 200-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.

19.4.1. Make the Big Screen Tiny

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

Figure 19-9. The message here tells you just how small and jerky your movie will be on the Web12 frames per second, 240 x 180 pixelsand how many megabytes it will occupy. (All of your Web-based movies together can't exceed your 125-megabyte iDisk account limit, unless you pay more money to Apple for more storage.)
Of course, you don't have to post the entire movie online. If you select only specific clips in iMovie before choosing the Share command, you're now offered the "Share selected clips only" checkbox, which posts only the selected stretch of your movie online.

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 GBabout 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 moviemakers before you, will have to make your Web-based movies tiny . To make your movie watchable by people with telephone-line modems, use the Expert settings described on Section 19.3.3.

If the need to downsize your movie like this doesn't crush your artistic pride , the worst is over. Here, then, is how you can make your videos available to the universe.

19.4.2. Posting to Your .Mac Account

By far the easiest way to post your movies on the Internet is to use one of Apple's $100-per-year .Mac accounts (visit www.mac.com for details, or open System Preferences, click .Mac, and click Sign Up). A .Mac account gives you a whole raft of Internet-based services and conveniences : electronic greeting cards, synchronizing of calendars and Web bookmarks among the different Macs in your life, a backup program, an antivirus program, the ability to check your email onlineand HomePage, which lets you generate your own Web page and occupy it with an iMovie movie.

In iMovie, you can post your finished masterpiece on a .Mac Web page with little more than a couple of clicks:

In iMovie, choose File Share; in the resulting dialog box, click HomePage .

The dialog box tells you how jerky your movie will be online (Figure 19-9).
Type a name for your movie and then click Share .

iMovie springs into action, compressing your movie to Web proportions and uploading it to the .Mac Web site. (This is not, ahem, a particularly quick process.)

When the uploading is complete, your Web browser opens automatically and takes you to the .Mac sign-in page.
Type your name and password. (Capitalization counts.) Click Enter .

The HomePage screen appears (Figure 19-10). A miniature version of the movie appears at center, and begins playing automatically for your approval and enjoyment. Farther down the page, you're offered about a dozen standard iMovie Webpage templates, such as Invite, Baby, and so on.
Click the "theater" style you prefer .

Next you arrive at the "Edit your page" page (Figure 19-11, top).

Fill in the movie title, description underneath the movie, and so on .

If you'd like to omit one of the proposed pieces of information (if you don't have any particular directorial notes, for example), edit it anyway, if only to delete the dummy text that appears there (see Figure 19-11).

Figure 19-10. The "Publish your iMovie" page is a summary of the three page-preparation steps you're about to take. At this point, the most urgent task is step 3, choosing a "frame" for the movie as it will appear on the finished Web page.
Remember that your movie will occupy only a small rectangle in the center of your visitors ' screens; the rest is graphic fluff to fill up the window.

Click Preview to see how the Web page will look .

Click the triangular Play button, shown in Figure 19-11, to try playing your movie over the Internet.
If everything looks good, click Publish .

When you click the Publish button at the top of the screen, the URL (Web address) for your Web page appears on your screen. You can copy and then email this link to anyone who'd be interested (Figure 19-11, bottom). Finally, your Web page is now available for everyone on the Internet to see.

You can create as many Web pages as you want (within the space constraints of your iDisk). When you return to the HomePage screen, a list of your existing Web pages appears (complete with Edit and Delete buttons ). So does the Add button, which you can click to start the process of building another Web page.

Behind the scenes, iMovie builds your movie Web site by placing new Web page (HTML) documents in the Sites folder of your iDisk. If you know how to use a Webpage creation program like Dreamweaver or even Microsoft Word, you can make changes to your Web page by editing these documents.

19.4.3. Posting a Movie on Your Own Web Site

Posting movies on other people's Web pages is one thing. In many cases, however, you might prefer the control and the freedom of putting movies onto your own Web page, designed the way you like it.

Figure 19-11. Top: Here's what your selected movie design looks like. If you don't want the caption to appear beneath itespecially one that says, "Write a sentence or two about your movie here"delete this dummy text.
Bottom: When it's all over, HomePage tells you the Web address for your new page. Copy this address and publicize it to spread the word about your new masterpiece.
If you click the little arrow button beneath the address, you can send an iCard (electronic greeting card sent by email) to announce it.

You'll quickly discover that this process is more technical than the ones described so far in this chapter. For example, the following discussion assumes that you do, in fact, already have a Web site.

19.4.3.1. Setting up streaming playback

QuickTime provides a feature called Fast Start, which means that when a Web page visitor clicks your movie, he can begin to watch it before it's downloaded in its entirety. His copy of QuickTime estimates when enough movie data has been downloaded so that the whole movie can play without having to pause for additional data. The effect is a lot like the streaming video feature described earlier, except that there's a considerable pause as the first portion of the movie is downloaded. (On the other hand, you save thousands of dollars on the cost of specialized hardware and software that's required for a true streaming-video system.)

To take advantage of this feature, use the Expert Settings dialog box when you're creating your QuickTime movie from the iMovie project. There, iMovie offers a checkbox called "Prepare for Internet Streaming."If you turn on this checkbox and choose Fast Start from the pop-up menu, iMovie automatically encodes some extra instructions into the resulting QuickTime file that permit your movie to do this "fast starting" when played back from your Web page.

19.4.3.2. Playing your movie

Once you've uploaded your iMovie, youand everyone else on the Internetcan watch it just by typing in the correct address. If your Web site's usual address is www.imovienut.com, and the name of your movie file is mymovie.mov , then the URL (address) for your new movie is www.imovienut.com/mymovie.mov. (If you placed it into a folder within your Web site listingcalled flicks, for examplethen the address is www.imovienut.com/flicks/mymovie.mov.)

Tip: Mac and Windows computers consider capital and lowercase letters equivalent in Web addresses like these. The Unix machines that dish out Web pages by the millions, however, don't. Therefore, using only lowercase letters is a good precaution to avoid subjecting your visitors to "Web page not found" messages.

If one of your fans types this address into the Web browser or clicks a link that goes to this address, one of three things happens:

If your visitor's computer has the QuickTime plug-in software installed (almost all modern Macs do), a new little movie window opens automatically. (See Figure 19-12.) A few seconds later, it begins to play automatically.
If your visitor doesn't have this QuickTime plug-in installed, which is possible if she's using a Windows computer, a message appears onscreen. It offers three choices: Track down the necessary plug-in, download the QuickTime movie to the hard drive, or choose another program to play the movie.

Tip: To make it easier for your Windows friends to download the plug-in necessary to watch QuickTime movies, create a link on your Web page that says something like: "To watch this movie, please download the free QuickTime plug-in at http://www.apple.com/quicktime."

Some browsers have been configured to hand off all downloadable files whose names end with .mov to a helper application , such as QuickTime Player. In such cases, QuickTime Player now opens (independently from the browser), and the movie appears in its window.

Figure 19-12. The easiest way to put a movie on your Web page is simply to upload it there. Then create a link to it. When clicked, the link makes the movie pop up in its own, separate window. Your viewers can use the Play, Stop, and scroll controls as they see fit.

POWER USERS' CLINIC
QuickTime Streaming Server

The Fast Start feature of QuickTime is a great feature. Without it, your movie wouldn't begin to play until its entire multimegabyte mass had been downloaded to your visitor's browser.

That's a good beginning. But in the professional world of Web video, the next step is QuickTime streaming . This relatively young technology lets many viewers simultaneously watch your movie in real time, live, as it's played from the host hard drivewithout waiting for anything to download.

QuickTime streaming makes possible live Webcasts , such as the occasional Steve Jobs keynote speech and other historic events.

Serving up QuickTime streaming isn't something that the average Mac can do. It requires a Power Mac equipped with special streaming QuickTime software, a full-time , highspeed Internet connection, and a copy of the Mac OS X Server operating system. Apple's QuickTime Streaming Web site has the details at www.apple.com/quicktime/servers.

19.4.3.3. Creating alternate versions

If your Web hosting service makes enough hard drive space available, consider creating an alternate version of your movie for viewers who don't have the QuickTime plug-in.

For example, the Windows equivalent of QuickTime is called the AVI format. Using QuickTime Player Pro, you can convert your movie into an AVI file, which you can post on your Web page exactly the same way you posted the QuickTime movie. Then you can put two different links on your Web page: "Click here for the QuickTime version (Mac users)," and "Click here for the AVI version (Windows users)."

19.4.3.4. The HTML code

If you know how to write HTML code (the language of Web pages), you can make the presentation of your movie a little bit more elegant. For example, you can use the <embed> tag to make the movie play right on the Web page, instead of in a separate window. You can also use the <autoplay> tag to make the movie begin playing the instant the browser has received enough data from the server. If you set the tag to false, your visitor must click the Play button.