With the increased availability of digital video recording and processing, more and more people are looking to share their creations online. You can do this in any of three ways. You could share your video as an email attachment, you could post it on your personal website, or you could post it to a dedicated movie website like Youtube.
Attaching a video clip to an email isn’t instantaneous; you will have to compress your footage first. All of the main video-editing applications can do this. When you select the option to compress in your video editing software, it will tell you about how big the file size will be after it’s compressed, so that you know if it will be small enough to send or not. Heavy compression comes at a cost in video and sound quality.
If you choose to post your video to a personal website, it will be accessible to more people, and you can just send people a link to your website if you want to share the clip by email. Depending on what software you use, you may be able to post higher quality video than you can send in an attachment. You might also be able to give your viewers the option of downloading your clip to their hard drive. To post video to your personal website, you’ll need to be moderately fluent with HTML, and you may want to use applications like V2F to help you generate the necessary code.
Posting your clip to a movie website will offer you maximum visibility, which may or may not be what you’re going for. Youtube is the most popular of these, but there are also various forums where you may be able to find a more selective audience that will be particularly interested in your work. The internet is an unpredictable place, and once you put something out there, there’s no telling what will go viral. Depending on how the site you choose is set up, this option will require more or less technological ability. Often, posting online will require some compression as well.
