6. Sharing Your Videos
The whole point of editing a home movie, TV show, or
other video is to watch it and, preferably, share it with others.
Unfortunately (but as we've come to expect), Windows Live Movie Maker
offers only limited ways to share your completed videos. You can save
them to your hard drive in reasonably high-quality, or you can publish
them to the Web. That's it. In previous versions of Windows Movie
Maker, you could publish to the PC, to DVD or CD, to e-mail, or back to
a digital video camera. On the other hand, those products were clueless
about popular video Web sites like YouTube. So this is progress,
depending on your point of view.
The publishing capabilities of Windows Live Movie
Maker are segregated into two separate options in the ribbon, Publish
and Output. Publish enables you to upload your video to a video-sharing
site, while Output is for creating local videos—that is, saving them to
the PC's hard drive. (Presumably, you're free to then copy those files
to DVD, CD, e-mail, or whatever, on your own.) We'll examine both
options.
6.1. Publishing to the Web
Ultimately, Windows Live Movie Maker has been
designed with one goal in mind: getting your videos online. And this is
where that happens. The thing is, out of the proverbial box, the
application only supports Microsoft's MSN Soapbox site. Don't feel bad
if you've never heard of this site, as few people have. That said, it's
not too shabby, and since this functionality is included with the
product, we'll cover it here.
To publish to MSN Soapbox, click the Publish button
in the ribbon's Home tab. (It's in the Make movie group.) You'll be
prompted to log on to your Windows Live ID, and will then be presented
with the Publish Your Video on MSN Soapbox window shown in Figure 19.
Here, you should type in a name for your video, a
description, and up to five descriptive tags (to help people searching
for videos on the site). You'll also need to pick a category and a
permission level (Public or Hidden). When you click OK, Windows Live
Movie Maker will create your video, transcode it to the format required
by MSN Soapbox, and then publish the finished product to the site. When
that's done—the amount of time it takes varies according to how much
content you've added to your project—you'll be prompted again, this
time to view it online or open the Soapbox-compatible file it created
(saved to My Videos, by the way). The resulting Web version of the
video should look something like Figure 20.
NOTE
Video upload—to MSN Soapbox, YouTube, or any
other site—isn't instantaneous. Oftentimes, if you publish a video to
the Web and then accept Windows Live Movie Maker's offer to view the
video online, it won't actually be available immediately. Just give it
a few moments: the site will do whatever preparatory work is required
and get your video posted as quickly as possible.
NOTE
Okay, so MSN Soapbox support is all well and
good, but for the other 99 percent of the population, integrating with
Google's super-popular YouTube service would be a lot more interesting.
Sure, you could simply use the Output option, described below, to save
a copy of your video to the hard drive and then manually upload it to
YouTube using that site's Web-based controls. But wouldn't it be nice
if you could simply upload to YouTube directly from Windows Live Movie
Maker? Yeah, that would be nice, and we've got good news: It's
completely doable.
To make this work, you need to install a Windows
Live Movie Maker plug-in that adds YouTube compatibility to the
application. So, instead of clicking the Publish button, click the down
arrow underneath this button. You'll see two options in the pop-down
menu that appears, Soapbox on MSN video and Add a plug-in. Click the
second option to visit the Microsoft Web site and locate the LiveUpload
to YouTube plug-in for Windows Live Movie Maker. (Alternately, simply
navigate to the plug-in's Web site: www.codeplex.com/liveuploadyoutube). Download the plug-in, close Movie Maker (saving your project if needed), and install it.
Once the plug-in is installed, open Windows Live
Movie Maker and reload your project. Then, click the down arrow under
Publish. As shown in Figure 21, there is a new option in the pop-down menu, LiveUpload to YouTube.
Choose this option. You'll be prompted to sign into
YouTube with your user name and password. Then you'll be presented with
a view similar to that provided by MSN Soapbox, where you must provide
a title, a description, keywords, a category, and a permission level
(Public or Private, in this case). This is shown in Figure 22.
Windows Live Movie Maker will go through the same
three steps as it does for MSN Soapbox—create, transcode, and
publish—and create an identical movie to the version created for
Microsoft's service. When you're done, you're given the same options
for viewing the video locally or on YouTube's Web site. Figure 23 shows what a published video looks like on YouTube.