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:
- In iMovie, select iPod from the Share menu, and click Share.
- When complete, go to iTunes, and locate it in the Movies Library.
- Select the movie, choose Get Info and then Info, to enter any metadata.
- Next, right click the movie and select Show in Finder.
- In the Finder, right click and select Open With to open it in QuickTime.
- Select Double Size from the View menu.
- Select Export… from the File menu.
- On the bottom, select Export: Movie to Hinted Movie and use the Default Settings. You need QuickTime Pro to do this. Get it here.
- Choose filename and location; I have a dedicated folder for all my hinted movies.
- 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.
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