From iMovie to the Web

Starting point: The movie has been properly edited in iMovie and now you want to share it with friends and family. What’s the quickest and easiest way?

Enter iPod and QuickTime: While I don’t have a video iPod, the export to iPod feature comes in very handy because it creates a nicely compressed movie with good quality that isn’t too large. For instance, a short 14 minute movie becomes 84 MB as compared to 1 GB for full DVD quality.

In addition to sharing it online, I want people to be able to both stream and download the movie. If you embed the movie in a page in iWeb, it will play nicely, but to save it you need QuickTime Pro. So instead of embedding it, I put up a still picture from which I link to the movie file. This way, if you left click on the picture, the movie opens on a separate page for online viewing. If you right click, you can save it to disk and watch it later. This is also useful when on a slow connection.

Here are the steps:

1. In iMovie, select iPod from the Share menu, and click Share.
2. When complete, go to iTunes, and locate it in the Movies Library.
3. Select the movie, choose Get Info and then Info, to enter any metadata.
4. Next, right click the movie and select Show in Finder.
5. In the Finder, right click and select Open With to open it in QuickTime.
6. Select Double Size from the View menu.
7. Select Export… from the File menu.
8. On the bottom, select Export: Movie to Hinted Movie and use the Default Settings. You need QuickTime Pro to do this. Get it here.
   
9. Choose filename and location; I have a dedicated folder for all my hinted movies.
10. Publish the movie to your web page using you favorite FTP program. I use Transmit.

That’s it. For more detailed tutorials, go to Apple’s QuickTime Pro Tutorials.

UPDATE August 2007:
This article was written before iMovie ’08 which now has a built-in interface to upload movies to YouTube.