Section 13.2. Posting to Your .Mac Account | iMovie HD & iDVD 5: The Missing Manual

13.2. 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 13-1).

Figure 13-1. 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.

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 13-2). 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 Web page templates, such as Invite, Baby, and so on.
Click the "theater" style you prefer.

Next you arrive at the "Edit your page" page (Figure 13-3, 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 13-3).

Figure 13-2. 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 13-3, to try playing your movie over the Internet.

Figure 13-3. 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 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.

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 13-3, bottom).

Tip: Unfortunately, the address is not particularly catchy; it's along the lines of http://homepage.mac.com/YourMemberName/imovie.html. If you'd prefer a URL that's shorter and catchier, investigate a free URL redirection service like www.here.is. These sites let you choose a more convenient Web address to distributeand then they auto-forward your visitors to the longer address. (And if the here.is service isn't working as you read this, do your own shopping for free redirection services by searching Google for "free URL redirection.")

Finally, your Web page is now available for everyone on the Internet to see. Corporations and professional Web designers may sniff at the simplicity of the result, but it takes them a lot longer than ten minutes to do the same thing.

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 , described next). So does the Add button, which you can click to start the process of building another Web page.

13.2.1.

13.2.1.1 Editing your Web page

To make changes to your Web site using the .Mac tools, proceed like this:

In your Web browser, go to www.mac.com. Click "Log In." Type your name and password and then click Enter.

Now you arrive at the main .Mac screen.
Click HomePage.

The HomePage screen appears. At the top left of the page is the list of Web pages you've created so far.
Click the name of the movie you want to edit, and then click the small Edit button beneath it.

You arrive at the main iMovie configuration page shown in Figure 13-3 at top, where you can change the movie you want to play (click the Choose button), the title you want to give it, and any notes you want to appear underneath it.
When everything looks good, click Publish.

You've just updated your Web page.

13.2.1.2 Behind the Screens

Behind the scenes, iMovie builds your movie Web site by placing new Web page (HTML) documents in the Sites folder of your iDisk (Figure 13-4). If you know how to use a Web-page creation program like Dreamweaver or even Microsoft Word, you can make changes to your Web page by editing these documents.

13.2.2. Other Internet "Film Festivals"

The .Mac system is very simple, and it's the ideal place to post home moviesflicks for whom the target audience is friends and family.

It's not, however, the only place to post your movies on the Web. Fueled by the recent success of independent, low-budget movies, Web sites have sprung up whose sole purpose is to accept and show independent, student, and amateur movies.

Figure 13-4. Top left: To summon your iDisk icon to the screen, choose its name from the Go menu in the Finder. Now wait: Even with a high-speed Internet connection, it can take awhile for your iDisk icon to appear on your desktop.
Top right: At last, however, it does, bearing your member name (top right). Double click itand waitto see its contents (bottom).
The HTML documents for your movie site are in the Sites folder; the movies themselves are in Movies

A number of these sites went under during the Great Tech Industry Meltdown of 20002003. Those that remain have much more obvious links to commercial Hollywood studios (that is, they show ads and sell DVDs). But the independent gene is still alive within them.

Most of these sites don't accept porn or home movies. But if you've attempted anything more ambitious, you lose nothing by posting your work on the sites. There's no charge. You generally retain the rights to your movie. And if your work is great, it will be noticed.

Tip: Before posting your movies, watch a few of the featured movies already on these Web sites to get a feel for what people are doing and what kinds of movies each of these sites accepts. You may get more out of watching the movies that other people have posted than posting your own. The lessons you can learn from other amateurs and independentsboth in the mistakes they make and in the clever techniques they adoptmake this book's teachings look like only Chapter 1.

For example, www. atomfilms .com is the big timethe most commercial and professional Web site of its kind. The site specializes in short films and animations, from 30 seconds to 30 minutes long. Your stuff has to be good to make the cut, however, as Atom posts fewer than 10 percent of the movies it receives. Its explicit purpose is to get them sold to TV producers and Hollywood studios. (Unfortunately, very few of the movies here are available in QuickTime format. Atom isn't one of the most Mac-friendly movie sites.)

www.iFilm.com is Atom's biggest rival. Since it's less fussy about what gets posted, several hundred movies are available. The odds are pretty good, then, that some of its contributors will get picked up. As made famous by Time magazine, two guys who made the short black comedy Sunday's Game, for example, were offered a TV development deal from Fox.

iFilm provides a special Web page for each movie, complete with your synopsis, credits, and feedback ratings. And the site is overflowing with special resources for filmmakers, such as news, reviews, lists of film festivals, and so on.

Tip: Want to get your movie postedand popularizedon some of these Internet film festivals? Then make a spoof of a popular commercial movie. No matter how poor the quality, nor how inexpensively done, clever satires rise to the top on these sites and get thousands of viewings. Saving Ryan's Privates, Pies Wide Shut, and The Sick Scents, for example, constantly top the iFilm.com "Most Viewed" list.