Why Use the Internet to Distribute Your Videos?

by Mark Richards

For end users and consumers, the Internet has created a wonderful and easy to use alternative to the painful and often expensive process of making copies of videos and mailing them to friends and relatives. In addition, in the past, every time you would make a video copy, you would lose quality. Digital is forever. Within the next few years, no one will be using videotape. Camcorders will be able to record video and audio directly to digital memory devices built-into the camcorder.

Using the Internet makes it simple for your friends and relatives to access your videos - at any time and at any place. All they need to do is to go the right web site and hit play and the movie starts playing. You can make your videos available to anyone who visits the web site or you can use special passwords and codes to make your videos accessible only to those people who you you share the passwords with.

What is Internet Video?

There are basically two flavors of Internet video. One consists of video movies and clips that are downloaded to your computer and stored on your hard drive. Once there, you can click on them to make them play back. This includes small video files that can be emailed to friends and relatives, as well as large files that can require hours to be digitally transferred over the Internet. Obviously, the type of Internet connection you have plays some impact here. If you have a slower dial-up connection, the shorter the movies and the smaller the file the better. If you have access to a high speed broadband connection (DSL or cable modem) then you can quickly transfer these big files without waiting around. 

The other type of Internet video is called Streaming Video, The Internet host first talks to your computer to figure out what kind of connection you have. This can be automatic or it can be you answering a few questions on the screen. Then it starts sending some of the video to you - building up what is called a buffer. When there is enough information in the buffer, your computer starts playing the video movie.  Unfortunately, sometimes Internet interference and congestion can cause the streaming flow to burp and stutter or stop altogether.

The big difference between streaming and downloading is that you can not watch a downloaded video movie until it is all downloaded onto your computer. With streaming, you can almost watch right away but there is no video stored on your hard drive. The next time you want to watch it, you have to go back to the web site and click on it again.

You can send someone a streaming media file that they can download onto their hard drive and watch whenever they want.

How do you use the Internet to share videos?

People can now share videos over the internet in three ways - you can email short videos and clips to anyone in the world; almost any computer can play back Windows Media, Quicktime and Real Media clips. The players are FREE and are included/bundled in most computers. 

People can also distribute and share videos by posting them to a commercial web site that provides free space. These sites are usually provided by computer hardware/software and camcorder manufacturers and provide a limited amount of space for video clips. For example, Sony Screenblast, at www.screenblast.com, provides 50 MBs of space, free video tools and a free showcase web site!


The third way is by posting these videos to your own personal web site.  Almost every ISP and service provider provides some free web space for personal web sites along with your Internet access. This includes cable and DSL providers, as well as dial-up providers like AOL. 

Businesses have also jumped on the Internet video bandwagon; providing a wide range of educational, how to and promotional videos direct from their sites. TV Stations also stream their videos. If you ever miss a story on
the local news and want to try to watch it again over the Internet, check out www.feedroom.com. Most major news sources also create daily videos of the top stories of the day and web cast them from their sites.

Maybe the most exciting is the streaming of full length Hollywood videos over the Internet. This is called Video on Demand. You go to an online video movie site, pay a couple of bucks and the movie then streams out to you over the Internet, DVD quality. You don't have to go to the
video or DVD store, you don't need to worry about late fees; you don't have to even own a VCR or DVD player or TV set. All you need is your computer and a high speed Internet connection (good DSL or cable modem). 

Why is it a good time to create Internet videos?

Over the last few years, it has become very easy and affordable  to create good videos and movies.

Camcorders have become much easier to use and much more powerful. Almost every camcorder now has a powerful zoom lens that makes it possible to get sharp close-ups from a distance. Almost every camcorder now includes image stabilization which removes much of the shakiness you get from handholding a camcorder. Most camcorders now include a fold-out viewscreen to make it possible to frame up and compose shots from almost nay angle - from over your head to down at your ankles.

However, the most important change is the advent of affordable digital video recording.

With the evolution of affordable digital video camcorders, you  can now capture video with quality that meets or exceeds that captured by professional broadcast cameras. Being that this is Digital Video (DV), you can now make copies and/or edit it without having to worry about losing quality.

Like your digital word files or photo files, your movies are now a series of ones and zeros. Similar to the evolution to digital CDs from  from analog records and audiotapes, people are now using Digital Video instead of analog video - 8mm and VHS. Because of DV technology, quality has improved and the picture always stays the same, regardless of how many times you edit it, play it or make copies..

Editing has also improved in both quality and ease. When editing from older analog VHS and 8mm cameras, you used to have to edit in a linear style, laying down each scene one by one. Not only did each edit result in a slight loss of quality, - if you made a mistake, or if you changed your mind, you had to start over and redo the editing from that point. 

Almost all modern editing equipment and software, even the free stuff provided by Microsoft (MovieMaker) and by Apple (iMOvie) works great, is very simple to use and can produce excellent looking video. However, the big advantage is that you are working in a nonlinear mode (NLE for nonlinear editing). 

You can mix and match your scenes. It is easy to move a scene from the end to the front. It is easy to shorten a scene or add new music or sound effects. It is similar to editing an letter. You can move a paragraph here or there. You can change a word, change the typeface, and move sections around. Modern NLE video editing allows you to do the sanme things with your video movies.

Modern editing programs are basically databases that refer back to the video and audio files. You can make as many changes as you want but it is not until the end, when you actually create the movie, that your computer finds the multimedia files and assembles them together.

Another recent advantage is that many editing programs today edit DV video. You no longer have to convert your older VHS and 8mm video to a digital format prior to editing (converting formats can create image quality loss). 

Over the last few years, if you wanted to edit DV, you first add to convert it to a digital format that the NLE programs could understand. This meant there was a small loss of quality. No longer. Many programs (even cheap and free ones!) now edit DV natively. You no longer have to convert the DV video. Check video editing software

You simply plug your DV camcorder into your computer's 1394 (or Firewire or iLink connection) and start your editing program. You turn on your camcorder and put in your tape. The software then walks you you through your videotape, enabling you to capture the good
parts and ignore the bad parts. Even better, some editing programs let you just copy your whole videotape to disk, and then the software goes through and automatically picks it apart into little scenes.

Do I need to be computer genius to edit video?

You don't need to know a lot to get started. You need to be a little bit computer savvy to hook up your camcorder to the computer; you need to know a little about how your computer and video editing software works. Windows MovieMaker and Apple's iMovie are extremely easy to use, in addition to being free. When you are finished with editing together a movie, you can then save it in the correct format - ie; mpeg for emailing, QuickTime, RealMedia or Windows Media for Internet streaming. Press the button, let it do its thing. Done.

There are a couple of programs like Muvee AutoProducer and Sony's MovieShaker that will automatically edit together great looking videos from your raw footage. 

Anyone can produce basic videos for home and family - just load the video into your computer, cut out the bad parts, put it into a good order, maybe add a title or two, and then save it as an Internet ready format. That's it.

As you get more experienced and confident, you can learn to add special effects and transitions, fancy moving titles, flying images and layers, animated objects and creatures, additional sound tracks and audio effects. And being that all of this is digital and happening in your computer, you can not damage or hurt you original video footage.

What do you need to get started making Internet videos?

You do need a computer, the newer and more powerful the better. I'd recommend a Pentium II, 350 MHz or a Mac G3 at a minimum. You should also have a big hard drive with lots of empty space. A few minutes of video can easily fill up a small hard drive. You should have at least 10 Gigabytes of empty hard drive space.

You need some kind of camcorder or video camera. You can use one of those inexpensive video web cams that sits on top of your monitor. You can even create movies if you don't have a camera or camcorder by finding free video footage on the Internet. Actually, there are a number of Internet web sites that allow you to edit videos at their web sites. They post the source videos and you can edit it by remote control using your computer.  Check Yahoo's Launch.com as a site to create your own music videos http://studiomatrix.videomixer.com/studiomatrix/launch.html

By the way, Internet Movies don't have to be based on videos. Many of the best and innovative new productions are animations and cartoons. One of the big advantages of using animation is that it doesn't take up as much bandwidth. This means that people with slow dial-up connections can appreciate these animations as well as those with high speed DSL and cable modem connections.  Check out Shockwave and their http://www.shockwave.com/sw/create/ web site for more info.