Section 13.7. Movies on Your Phone


13.7. Movies on Your Phone

When most people hear the word movie, they think "big screen." But high-tech has marched on, small is beautiful, and suddenly we've entered an era when people are content to watch video on very small screens. Mind-blowing though it may seem, you can now send movies directly to the screens of certain cellphones. No longer must you show people lame wallet photos of your family; you can play them movies of your family, right there on the street.

Unfortunately, you can't send your movies to any old cellphoneonly those with Bluetooth that are 3GPP-compliant . Here's what that means:

  • Bluetooth is a radio technology with a maximum range of 30 feet. The whole idea isn't so much networking as eliminating cables from our lives, which is an idea most people wholeheartedly support.

    Already you can get Bluetootheither built-in or as a plug-in USB devicefor computers, printers, cellphones, cellphone headsets, Palm and PocketPC organizers, Sony camcorders, and so on. Apple's wireless keyboard and mouse both rely on Bluetooth.

    All iMovie cares about, though, is whether or not your Mac has Bluetoothmany models do, including all laptopsand whether your cellphone does. (Technically, iMovie can send movies to more than just phones and Macs; it can send to palmtops, too. At the moment, though, there aren't any 3GPP palmtops.)

  • 3GPP is a video standard for cellphones. (It stands for Third Generation Partnership Program, since you asked.) If your Bluetooth phone is fairly recent, it may be 3GPP-compliant; check with your cell company.

    The phone has to have a movie-playing program on board, too; all 3GPP videophones do.

If you're suitably equipped, here's how the transfer goes:

  1. When your movie is fully edited, save it. Choose Share Bluetooth .

    The Share sheet shown at top in Figure 13-9 appears. As usual when you export a movie, you can turn on "Share selected clips only" if you want to send only a piece of your movie (and you highlighted the appropriate clips beforehand).

  2. Click Share .

    iMovie takes quite awhile to compress your movie. Of course, ordinarily iMovie strives to maintain the best quality possible, with high resolution, full TV-screen size , CD-quality stereo sound, and so on. But for a phone, you want super-compressed, ultra -tiny, monophonic movies, and converting from the high-res format to the low-res one takes some time.

    When the compression is complete, the Select Bluetooth Device dialog box appears (Figure 13-9, bottom). Make sure your phone is turned on. Make sure, too, that in its Bluetooth settings, Bluetooth is turned on and discoverable , meaning that your Mac can "see" it.

  3. Click Search .

    After a moment, your phone's name appears in the list.

  4. Click the phone's name, and then click Select .

That's all there is to it. On the phone's screen, you'll probably see a message to the effect that it's receiving a file. After a while, the movie's transmission will be complete. Open the phone's media-playing program and play away.


Tip: iMovie stores a copy of the super-compressed movie inside your project "package" (Section 4.13), in the Shared Bluetooth folder. Its file name ends with .3gp.If youre ever inclined to send that movie againto one of your many other friends who have 3GPP-compliant, Bluetooth phonesyou can shoot it right over without having to wait for iMovie to crunch the thing down to pocket size, thus eliminating step 2 above. Use the Bluetooth File Exchange program in your Applications Utilities folder to do it.




iMovie 6 & iDVD
iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual
ISBN: B003R4ZK42
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 203
Authors: David Pogue

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