7.9 Creating a Movie Page with iMovie 4

One of the most well-known iApps in Apple's arsenal is iMovie, which first saw its debut back in the Mac OS 9 days. Over the last few years , Apple has continued to improve iMovie, adding new features like the Ken Burns effect, more titling schemes, and integration with your iTunes music library. With iLife '04, iMovie 4 takes another leap forward in all sorts of ways, but one that's of interest to .Mac members is that you can quickly publish your iMovies direct to your .Mac HomePage with just a few simple clicks.

To create a new movie page from iMovie 4, follow these steps:

1. Create your movie in iMovie.

2. Once you've finished your masterpiece, select File Share (Shift- -E) from the menu bar; a sheet slides out of iMovie's titlebar, presenting you with some options for sharing your movie.

3. Click on the HomePage button at the top of the sheet (shown in Figure 7-41) to see the options iMovie offers for creating your movie page.

   Figure 7-41. Click on the HomePage button in the sheet to start the process of creating a movie page.

   
   

4. When you click on the Share button in the sheet, iMovie 4 compresses your movie to 12 frames per second, squeezes it down in size to 240 180 pixels, and then uploads a QuickTime movie file to the Movies folder on your iDisk. After the movie has successfully loaded on your iDisk, iMovie 4 launches your default web browser to the page shown in Figure 7-41.

5. Click on one of the nine themes to apply the theme to your movie, as shown in Figure 7-42.

   Figure 7-42. Once on your iDisk, it's time to select a theme to wrap around your iMovie.

   
   

6. Click on the Edit button in the toolbar at the top of the page to change the link for your HomePage's navigation area, and to add a title and description for your movie, as shown in Figure 7-43.

   Figure 7-43. Now your movie has been "themed"; time to edit the page.

   
   

7. Once you've edited the text fields (see Figure 7-44), click on the Preview button to view the page.

   Figure 7-44. Edit the text fields for your movie page.

   
   

8. If you're happy with how the page looks (and you've checked the spelling), click on the Publish button to add the movie page to your .Mac HomePage.

As you can see, iMovie 4 really makes it incredibly easy for you to publish movies on your .Mac HomePage. You don't have to worry about resizing the movie; just click a few buttons , change some text, click another button or two, and your masterpiece is published to the Web.