From bore to Blockbuster in 18 simple steps

Posted on 12 Dec 2008 at 17:26

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Editing is doubly important if you're preparing video for the web, whether to share with friends and family or to promote a business. Users won't wait for massive files to download, and most won't usually have the patience to sit watching for ages, so brevity is essential.

Sharing your project

Once your video project is complete, it's time to unleash it on the world. Probably the two most common methods of distribution are now optical disc (DVD or Blu-ray) and online.

If the likely audience for a project is friends and family, a DVD or Blu-ray copy of the project is generally the best way to go. This is especially true if the original footage is in HD format. Most modern PCs have a drive that can write DVDs. Burning a Blu-ray disc will enable you to retain the full quality of the original footage, but it means installing a Blu-ray writer in your PC, and these drives are still quite rare and pricey at the moment.

The other option for sharing high definition video with other users is simply to export the project as a file to a memory card or USB memory drive. Anyone else with a recent PC should be able to access this (with a memory card reader if you choose that route), but obviously it won't work with DVD players and the like, and even hardware that accepts the same storage format, such as games consoles, may not support the video file format you've used. Optical discs are a safer bet for sharing; you can always save your movie in standard definition on an ordinary DVD, keeping the HD project on your PC for later use.

If you want lots of people to be able to view your project, it makes more sense to make it available online. Again, you could simply upload the whole video file to a server, such as the web space supplied by your Internet service provider, and let other PC users download it, but the file may be very large indeed. It's more convenient to post your video on a service such as YouTube.com, where anyone can watch it immediately. That means reducing the quality substantially to convert the file to a suitable format, but it gives you a much larger potential audience.

Whether you want to distribute your project on memory stick, DVD or online, you'll need to export and/or convert it into the appropriate file format. DVDs require video to be saved as MPEG-2 files, while there are numerous formats for online clips. Encoding video is a potentially confusing task, so the best approach is to use the default settings provided by your video editing application to begin with. There should be a choice of preset options associated with different media.

Exporting a video project and encoding it into the required format is a processor hungry task. You won't be able to do this with a basic computer such as a netbook, and even with a powerful PC you shouldn't be surprised to find the export process takes considerably longer than the running time of your video. If you've followed our tips to edit your project to perfection, the results will be worth the wait.

Author: Ben Frain