Last week I told you about Photo Story 3, a great way to make a movie from your photos. But, once you get the movie completed, then what? It plays great on your computer, but the people you want to share it with aren’t sitting next to you, they may be scattered all over the country.
Photo Story 3 can render your movie small enough to send as an email attachment, but it’s awfully tiny. If you have your own website, you can upload the full-size video (a .wmv file ) and set up a link so people can download and view it. This will be the highest quality. Macintosh users won’t be able to view it properly though – see the comments to last weeks’ post. Uploading videos to Youtube.com is probably the most popular method of sharing videos. That is really quite easy. You need to set up a Youtube account – it’s free – then use their ‘upload’ tool to get your video online.
Here is a video I just made for this blog post. It is 7 photos with music and narration added by Photo Story 3. I used all three of the above techniques to share it with you. You can click on each of them to see the difference.
1. Email size video: 269k
2. Full-size .wmv file hosted on my website: 2.23 megabytes, be patient!
3. Full-size .wmv file uploaded to Youtube.com you will need the Flash viewer.
Those are three choices, but there is a 4th – and it’s my favorite. Use Picasa! You’ve probably heard of Picasa for managing your digital photos. Picasa makes it one-click easy to upload your photos to a web album. If you want to learn how, watch the videos on my website. Web Albums are provided free of charge courtesy of Google, the owner of Picasa. What many people don’t know is that Picasa will upload videos to your web album as well as photos.
4. Full-size .wmv file uploaded to Picasa Web Album
Both Youtube and Picasa Web Albums convert the movie to a flash format and compress it. The quality suffers in the process, but I think the Picasa version is at least as good as the Youtube, and I like having the video in the same location as all my photos.
Chris Guld
www.GeeksOnTour.com
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Chris Guld
Sharry,
I forgot to mention – the best way to share big videos is to burn them to DVD. Then you can mail the DVD. Unfortunately, Photo Story does not have DVD burning capabilities built in, but you can download this DVD-burning plug-in or use Windows Vista DVD Maker.
Chris Guld
Hello FullTimerNormie,
Thanks for your comments! The picasa version should be somewhere in between the quality of the email version and the full .wmv file. But, yes, it’s still pretty small.
Sharry,
A 20 minute movie is most likely a huge computer file. The sample video in this article is only 48 seconds and takes up 2.23 megabytes. I usually estimate 3-4 megabytes per minute. At that rate, yours would be 60 – 80 megabytes. That’s big. Here’s Youtubes advice on video file size:
“Uploads usually take 1-5 minutes per MB on a high-speed connection, and converting your video takes a few minutes. Your video is limited to 10 minutes and 100 MB.” Some other hosts limit you to 20 megabytes.
Here is an article about other Video hosting websites.
Sharry
I do not have a website but I have made “movies” of our 2007 RV trip to the Pacific Northwest. I have used the maximum amount of pictures for each movie – each runs approximately 20 minutes. Is there any place I could upload these besides YouTube? I have 5 movies.
FullTimerNormie
Hi Chris…very interesting info on movies. The comparison between the email version and the version uploaded to your website is sorta like comparing regular TV to HDTV…WOW you are right about the highest quality…what a difference. The Picasa version is similar in quality to the email version also….at least that is how it all plays on this computer I am on right now…I do not have access to YouTube from this computer so I can’t compare that one. We are impressed with what can be done with PhotoStory 3 and you have given us the bug….we are going to download and play around with it this weekend.
We love your postings…thanks for all the great info. Norma