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