Lesson13.Putting Your Slide Show on the Internet

Lesson 13. Putting Your Slide Show on the Internet

Lesson Files	Lessons > Lesson13 > Start_BizOwnerVideo13
Tools	iMovie, iPhoto, .Mac account
Time	Approximately 40 minutes
Goals	Grab still images from videotape
	Move folders of images into iPhoto
	Show off your iPhoto slide shows on the Internet with Apple's .Mac service

DVDs are great for small distribution, and digital video cassettes make good archives and are often fine for watching videos at home. But sometimes it's important to get your material out to a wider audienceon the Internet. At the end of Lesson 11, you saw how quickly you can upload a finished movie directly from iMovie to a Web page at Apple's .Mac Internet service. Now you're going to see the corresponding simplicity of uploading a slide show to the Web.

Throughout the lessons in this book, you've been learning to improvise. Not everyone has a digital camera and a camcorder, and even if you did, you don't always use them both in every situation. In Lesson 6, you learned to make a movie with photographs from a camera. Now you're going to learn to make a slide show with video from a camcorder.

The studio owner, Jennifer, doesn't use her still camera very often; she is more comfortable with her video camcorder. She sees iMovie as a tool that helps her find just the right frames of video, grab them, and turn them into photographs that she can then manage easily in iPhoto.

iPhoto makes it easy to organize the stills into albums and upload them to the Web for presentation. While the image quality of video frames is far inferior to that of dedicated still cameras, the Web demands that images be compressed, and therefore degraded from the high resolution you get in prints. The lower resolution of a camcorder makes it a perfectly suitable camera for shooting photographs for the Web. Jennifer keeps a gallery of shots from around her studio online and updates it often. It's easy because she pulls the still shots from the videotapes she shoots and uploads them to her company Web site with iPhoto.

All of this is contingent, of course, upon having an account with .Mac, Apple's suite of Internet services, including Web hosting. As a sophisticated Macintosh user for many years, Jennifer initially imagined a user-friendly Internet account like .Mac to be unnecessary. Her company maintains a Web site on a local hosting service, and she has been very happy with it. Still, the .Mac account is more than an ordinary Web host; it's one that's highly tuned to work with the iLife applications. In the same way that music effortlessly moves from iTunes to iMovie and iPhoto, .Mac interacts with iLife to make Web pages, slide shows, and movies easy to build, update, and share. After years of conspicuous avoidance, Jennifer got a .Mac account to streamline all her iLife workand she even found a way to integrate it with her existing Web site for maximum effect. (For more information on .Mac accounts, see the Getting Started chapter.)

This lesson has two distinct parts, both of them simple and both of them important. The first happens in iMoviethe process of grabbing a bunch of still images. The second happens in iPhotobuilding a slide show and putting it on the Internet through a .Mac account.