Digital Video Tips: The Best Ways to Share Videos on the Web or DVD

Whether they capture your daughter's first birthday party or your latest assault on the twin peaks of Kilimanjaro, videos are for sharing. These tips will help you keep your audience's attention as they view the show on the Web or play it from a DVD. (Visit last October's Digital World section for tips on using Adobe Premiere Elements to produce a DVD.)

Film a lot, but edit down: When you are having your adventures, shoot as much video as you can. When you get home, edit it down to the scenes you really want to show people. Your audience won't be interested in your entire 45-minute cruise around San Francisco Bay, but they will want to see a minute or so of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and Sausalito.

Use credits for the details: Instead of sticking the trip itinerary at the start of the video, position it at the end (much the way studios append the credits on movies and TV shows). That way, viewers who aren't interested can skip that info.

Play It on the Web

Pick the right format: Before you can put your video on the Web, you must do some serious compressing. A good video editing program will let you squish the videos and convert them to the right Web format: Windows Media (.wmv), QuickTime (.mov), or Flash (.swf). Your video editor should offer presets for various connections, too; pick a slow frame rate and/or a small playback window size, unless you're certain that viewers will be using broadband connections. Microsoft's free Windows Movie Maker video editing program for Windows XP will automatically encode the video and upload it to a video-hosting service such as Neptune MediaShare (starting at $59 per year with 150MB of storage; free three-day trial) or MyDeo (starting at $5 per minute of video and 200 views). Note that Neptune MediaShare requires using the Internet Explorer browser.

Host your video on the Web for free: Several Web sites will compress and host your video for free after you register, letting anyone with a Web browser watch it. You Tube, Ourmedia, and Google Video are among such sites.

Send video by e-mail: Windows Movie Maker lets you compress video so that it won't overload the recipient's inbox: Select Send in e-mail on the program's Finish Movie menu (see FIGURE 1), and follow the prompts to compress your video and attach it to an e-mail message (for more, visit Microsoft's Movie Maker tutorial).

Put It on DVD

Use chapters for navigation: Some video editing programs (not Windows Movie Maker, though) let you organize your home movies into chapters like those commercial DVDs use to help viewers find a particular scene in a movie. Simply put a chapter pointer in the video as you edit it: In Ulead's $50 DVD MovieFactory, for instance, you can add chapters either manually at specific points or automatically with the program's scene detection feature.

Use a still frame in a menu: A frame from your video can be a backdrop for your DVD's menu. Most video editing programs (but not Windows Movie Maker) let you pick a frame from the video in a couple of mouse clicks. Check the documentation for the specific process; many programs refer to this as a frame grab.

Use the highest quality settings: You might be tempted to use the higher compression settings since the resulting files require less disk space, allowing you to put more videos onto a single DVD--but you'll pay a big price in playback quality. Put less video on each disc, even if that means stretching a long movie over two discs. Alternatively, you could take it as a sign that your movie is too long and needs to be edited down. This means you, Kevin Costner.

Put the movies on good discs: Employ discs that are made to last; keep them in their cases when they aren't in use, and store them in a cool, dry place.

Make a nice label: It's no sweat--both Avery and Fellowes provide downloadable DVD-label design templates on their Web sites.

Richard Baguley writes the Making Movies column for PCWorld.com.