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Quickguide

Creating Video for the web
A Quick Overview

shooting video in Hokitika New Zealand

This page will give you a quick guide to creating video for the web.

In addition to your computer you will need a video camera or some other device to shoot your footage on (e.g. a webcam or a digital stills camera with video/movie mode - we compare these and video cameras here). We're not going to teach you how to shoot video or use your camera - you can refer to it's manual and look at the host of help available to budding videomakers both on & off line.

Once you've got your video you'll need to transfer the video to your PC. With Webcam the video file should be save your hard drive. With digital still cameras the video file will be save to the camera's memory just like still pics and can be transferred in the usual fashion (again refer in both cases to your instruction manuals).

With video cameras you'll need to transfer the video from tape to your PC. With analogue (and some basic digital) video cameras you'll need a video capture device & software that will encode your video into a digital file format and save it to your hard drive. Life may be easier with digital video cameras that can be linked to your PC via highspeed Firewire (IEEE1394) links. Their signal is already encoded digitally and simply needs to be saved. You may need software to help with this (systems with windows ME or XP will have windows movie player which will import this sort of video, as part of their standard installation).For more on these matters see here.

You'll now need to edit your video file. This is not just to make a good video sequence, but video files are often huge (1 hour of Digital Video footage occupies about 10Gb of drive space!!). For web video you will need to reduce the size of the file to a few hundred Kb.

You can do this by shortening the length of footage, making the frame smaller (e.g. from 640 x480 to 120x90), compressing the footage and reducing frame rate (for more on these see here). Most video editing software packages will help with this (we have a guide to windows movie maker 2 in this section)

Once you've finished your file you'll need to save it in a common web video format. You have several choices

Standard file types

.avi
.mpeg
.mov (better known as quicktime)
.wmv (windows media video - new format)

Once you feel happy you can also use steaming media file formats (file plays as it downloads). You may need a special server. Common choices are

.mov
.wmv
.ra (real video)

For more on file formats including streaming media see here

Now you have your file you can add it to web pages

The easiest way is to create a link like these

Franz Josef Glacier .wmv (90Kb)
Georgia the cat quicktime (180Kb)

In HTML you can do this easily with a standard link (<a>) tag

<a href="yourmoviename.avi">click here</a>

(obviously just replace link URL (yourmovie.avi) with URL and name of your movie file) . We'd recommend you add the target="_blank" attribute (e.g. <a href="yourmoviename.avi" target="_blank">)

With Frontpage Express

Create a link as before but...

Frontpage express create hyperlinks box

click the (1) world wide web tab and set (2) hyperlink type to "(other)". In the (3) URL box type in the name or URL of your video file (e.g. "myfilm.avi" or "../video/myvideo.mov"). Instead of the link being pointed at a webpage it is aimed directly at the movie file.

In target frame box (1) you can put in _blank to prevent loss of your current page.

With composer, this is essentially coded like any other link

Just create a link as before

composer link property boxes for versions 4.x and 6.x

In the (B) Link to box type in the name or URL of your video file (e.g. "myfilm.avi" or "../video/myvideo.mov"). Instead of the link being pointed at a webpage it is aimed directly at the movie file.

To make the link open in a separate window so you don't loose the current one, hit the Extra HTML.. button (composer 4.x) and type in target="_blank" then hit okay

or in composer 6.x hit additional properties and select target attribute and enter value of _blank (Y)

composer 6.x advanced properties box

 

You can embed Video directly on web pages. For more on all of this each of our HTML, Frontpage Express and composer tutorials has a guide to adding video.

Now all you need to do is transfer by FTP your video file and relevant pages to your website (see our FTP pages if you don't understand this)

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