Maria Langer

Releasing your creation to the world.

There are several ways you can publish a movie for sharing with others. The method you choose depends on who you want to see it and what their viewing capabilities are.

Getting your movie ready for prime time.

At this point, you should have your movie roughly assembled and ready for finishing. This is where you fine-tune edit points and work on elements such as transitions, narration, and music.

Let’s take a look at some of the things you might need to consider.

Assembling the pieces of the story.

If you stuck to the shot list you created in step 2 and acquired all the video you need in step 3, you should be ready to tackle the next step, which is to assemble video clips into a rough cut of your story. This is where you get to try out your non-linear editing skills and test your knowledge of your video editing software.

The purpose of this article is not to explain how to edit video with your software of choice—or mine, for that matter. Instead, I’ll explain the kinds of things you should be thinking about and doing as you assemble the clips.

Shooting is the process of gathering the building blocks for your movie.

With shot list in hand, and all your other preliminary planning in mind, you’re ready to shoot or acquire the video footage. As you might imagine, this is a critical part of the movie-making process. Your movie can only be as good as the video you build it with.

I can’t instruct you how to use your camera to shoot video. I can, however, provide you with some terms and concepts that you need to consider when shooting. I can also offer some tips for getting the job done effectively. That’s what this part of the series is all about.

So you know what you’re doing before you do it.

In Step 1, you came up with a good topic idea and learned more about it. This research should have helped you understand what your story was going to be about.

Doing your homework first will save time and effort later.

A movie needs a topic. It isn’t enough to just come up with a vague idea and start shooting video. Instead, it’s best to develop a movie topic and spend some time learning about it—before you do anything else.

Some Mac OS X applications provide services that enable you to use content from one application with another. The content can include text, graphics, or movies. For example, the services for Mail and Safari (among others) are available from within TextEdit (Figure 1). This means you can use Mail to send selected text as an e-mail message or Safari to quickly open a selected URL.

QuickTime Player has been completely revised and reworked for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The free version that comes with Mac OS now has the ability to record movies — a feature that was previously available only in the "Pro" version of QuickTime Player.

Ever want to listen to a bunch of songs that are similar to a specific song, but you don’t have the time to create a playlist? The new Genius feature in iTunes can come to your rescue. It analyzes the songs in your iTunes library and can generate a playlist, on the fly, based on just about any song within it. All you need to do is turn on the Genius feature, create a playlist, and start playing.

Mac OS X's stacks feature displays the contents of any folder in the Dock as a fan (Figure 1), grid (Figure 2), or list (Figure 3). You click the folder icon to display the stack. Then click the item in the stack to open it. This makes it easy to organize Dock items and access the applications, folders, and files you use most.

The new version of the Mac OS, Snow Leopard, has several very cool features that are not immediately apparent. This week, I’ll share several of them with you -- one per day.