New media
How to upload video
Ourmedia is for everyone who wants to publish grassroots media: novices, hobbyists and experts. Ourmedia accepts video in all formats.
Five steps
Creating video consists of five steps:
Step 1: Capture your footage with a camcorder, camera or cell phone
Step 2: Transfer your footage to your computer
Step 3: Edit your video with video-editing software
Step 4: Optimize your video for playback on the Web
Step 5: Share your video with the world by uploading it to Ourmedia
Step 1: Just shoot it!
Too many people forget that the first rule of video is to capture it. Don't be afraid to shoot more footage than you need — you can cut it down during the editing process. In the months ahead, we'll be adding tips by experts on best practices for shooting video.
Step 2: Transfer your footage
Your home digital video camera should come with a transfer cable to transfer video from your camcorder to your PC (via USB or IEEE-1394) or to your Mac (via FireWire). For other devices, read your manual, research it online, or ask a question in our Community Forums.
Also remember: You don't need video to make a home movie. Some of the best digital stories use only photos and a narrative voiceover.
Step 3: Edit your video
If you use user-friendly software like Apple's iMovie, editing video is pretty straightforward. Follow the steps on any of dozens of educational sites such as this one. PC Magazine has a good roundup of video editing techniques here.
Avid has a free version of their video editing software. Other video editing software includes Final Cut Express, Adobe Premiere, Roxio Easy Media Creator, Pinnacle Systems Studio, Ulead VideoStudio, Windows Movie Maker (bundled with Windows XP, with tips for its use here) and others.
Step 4: Optimize your video
Codecs (compression software) squeeze your video for easier transfer over the Internet without losing much in the way of picture quality. Most digital home video cameras record in formats that can be posted online fairly easily.
Tools for optimizing (aka encoding) include Sorenson; Apple's iMovie, QuickTime Pro, Final Cut Pro; and Turbine Video Encoder to encode video into Flash. An excellent choice is the free, open-source Vorbis Theora. Ourmedia member Michael Verdi has put together this this page for optimizing video with the 3ivx codec (click through the link to get the PDF tip sheet).
Before optimizing, you'll want to consider how many users will be able to view your video without installing special viewer software. The "codec wars" make for a messy terrain today, with competing formats such as QuickTime, Real Video, Windows Media, DivX, Flash, MPEG and others. All of these have fairly wide distribution. More information at me-tv, and here is a chart showing marketplace penetration for the leading media players.
A second factor to consider is that many users don't like video that comes in closed, proprietary formats that can't be played on other video players.
Ourmedia encourages the use of open standards such as MPEG-4 (Apple's iMovie lets you output your video in MPEG-4). In time, the new codec H.264, used in Apple's QuickTime 7, will be an excellent choice, but it has a tiny penetration today and doesn't yet play on PCs.
The next best choice may be MPEG-4 or QuickTime because these videos play on the majority of PCs and Macs (though not Linux machines). Alternatively, Flash comes installed on more than 95 percent of all personal computers, although some users don't like the lack of user controls on Flash movies, and few people have the software to encode in Flash.
A word of caution: Don't be fooled by "codec packs" on the Web that promise to give you all the formats you need. Some of these contain nasty software.
Step 5: Share your video
Our SpinXpress publishing tool and upload my media pages are designed to simplify the upload process while capturing necessary text information about your video.
Send us suggestions for improving the process.
