It’s increasingly likely that, in addition to authoring DVD versions of your edited video projects and copying back to tape in the camcorder, you’ll want to configure your movie for sharing with friends and family members over the Internet. With the widespread use of broadband connections, many people are now realizing the benefits of being able to send and receive good quality video clips at a speed that simply wasn’t possible on dial up connections.
Also, more and more people are exchanging short video clips via their cell phones, PlayStation Portables, and iPod Video devices, so why not take full advantage of this exciting new range of distribution options?
All popular video editing and export programs contain utilities designed to enable the easy, hassle-free, conversion of your full screen digital video files to those formats appropriate to sharing over limited bandwidth. Even though your broadband Internet connection might be fast, it still has its restrictions and there’s no way you’ll be able to share your clips unless they’re reduced in window size and file size. That entails compression using similar techniques appropriate to DVD authoring, only with much greater compression rates.
In order to view video files over the Internet, the end user will need to use a software player. If you want to create flash video and upload the flash video for online sharing with more friends, you need to find software to convert video to flash. Common examples of these include Microsoft Windows Media Player, Apple QuickTime, and Real Networks’ Real Player. Other choices include Macromedia Flash and DivX (although the latter is more suited to desktop computer and disk playback). By using the first two, you’ll cover most of the user base, and there are versions for Windows PCs as well as Apple Mac.
