Section 13.1. Make the Big Screen Tiny

13.1. 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 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 . You'll have to choose a small frame size , a low frame rate, and so onor, rather, let iMovie do this job for you.

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.