First time

[Steveisme1]

Hello! I am a newbie at video editing, so any help would be appreciated. I have a video clip on my PC that I created using a digital camcorder. What would be the best way to load it to my website? I want people to be able to click on a link and their preferred player will open and play the clip. Would streaming video be an option?

Thanks,
Steve

[theDruid]

You'd need to give us the details of the file...

Is it an MPEG? is it an avi?

Run it through gSpot if you're not sure.

We can't really help without some more info..

cheers,
mcdruid.

[Steveisme1]

Thanks for your reply. I think it is mpeg, but I downloaded g spot to check....how do i use it??

[theDruid]

To use gSpot, either drag and drop your file onto the gSpot window, or go through the menus on gSpot - File->Open.

To be honest, gSpot is less useful for MPEG's.

Does the file have an .avi or a .mpg extension? (if you've got 'hide file extensions' on and can't see these, I suggest you turn it off in Explorer (NOT Internet Explorer).

You may also be able to find this out by Right clicking the file, and selecting Properties.

How big is the file? (again Properties should tell you)

cheers,
mcdruid.

[Steveisme1]

It says mpeg movie file. When I click on it, the Media player comes up and plays the clip.

[Steveisme1]

One of the clips is 31mb....less than a minutes worth of video. Does that help?

[theDruid]

31mb for less than a second of video is maybe a little excessive for use on a website!!

It would take users several minutes to download even on a decent connection, and for users on dial-up, you'd be talking 2 hours+.

I would suggest that you'll need to compress it down. You might want to think about re-sizing the video so it's a lower resolution too (this will make it appear better quality if you have to encode it at low bitrates to achieve a small filesize).

You can always have two or more alternative versions for users to access depending on their connection (as many sites do).

As for what format to use, there's no easy answer.

Windows Media is one of the most popular - Real and QuickTime are also common on the web.

There are other alternatives - a properly encoded MPEG-1 will be very compatible with different users' systems etc... and a DivX avi would allow you good quality video with a small size.

There are advantages and disadvantages to all of these options.

One thing you might like to try is to encode your file to Windows Media using the free Windows Media Encoder (WME).

I'd aim for about 1 to 2mb for a 'low bandwidth' option, and maybe 5mb for a higher bandwidth option.

I'm not sure if you can set the bitrate as such with WME, I think the options may just be for 'high/low quality' etc..

You could also try MPEG-1 using TMPGEnc, or DivX using VirtualDub and the DivX5 codec.

As for Streaming content on your site - this totally depends on the sort of hosting package that you have - you'd need to find out from your host about what their servers support. Windows Media streaming is supported by some hosts, and Real streaming is quite common.

If you can't do streaming, just upload the clip(s) to somewhere suitable on your webspace, and put a link in to them just like you would do anything else.

cheers,
mcdruid.

[Steveisme1]

Thanks for your help........I'll give it a bash!


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