Chapter 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22
Appendix A | Appendix B | Appendix C | Glossary | Index | Legal Stuff | License


Chapter 5 - Compressing for the Web Tutorial


In this tutorial, we are going to compress a movie for inclusion on a WWW page, use the created HTML embed tag to put it into a sample page, and upload the page and movie to your server for online viewing.

Starting Tutorial 2

1. Begin the Interview

Open the Media Cleaner Wizard window from the Windows menu. Click on the "Open..." button and open the "Tutorial 2 - Source" movie from the "Tutorials" folder.

NOTE: This movie does not have a sound track. Like the other tutorial movies, it is JPEG compressed and will not play smoothly.


2. Choose WWW Movie

Select "WWW" for your desired Delivery Medium.

If you have a choice later in the interview, choose "QuickTime" for the desired format. Make sure to read the text on the left to better understand the tradeoffs you are making.


3. Continue the Interview

Go through the interview choosing the samples and options that you like best, and then pressing the "Continue" button.

If you selected a "Full Install" of Media Cleaner, all the sample movies should be visible, and you should be able to move between screens with only a short delay. If you chose the "Medium Install" or "Minimum Install," there will be a longer delay as you move between screens, and some or all of the movies will not be visible unless the Media Cleaner Pro 2.0 CD-ROM is currently in your CD-ROM drive.


4. Save your Settings

At the end of the interview, the Wizard will show you an overview of the settings it has created based on your answers. You can save these settings for future use. Click the "Save Settings" button. You will be prompted for a name. Name your settings group "Tutorial 2."

NOTE: The settings the Wizard makes for you are not saved automatically. You must save them if you want to use them again.

Instead of going through the whole interview process, you can apply a saved setting at the beginning of the interview process by clicking on the "Select Setting" button. The Wizard will go to the last interview screen and indicate that you've selected an existing setting. We won't use this feature in this tutorial, but it's useful for future projects.


5. Compress

Start the compression by pressing the "Start" button in the Status Bar.

When Media Cleaner prompts you for a destination of the movie, make a new folder on your desktop named "Tutorial 2" with the "New Folder" button, then save the movie as "T2.mov". Make sure not to use spaces or any special characters in the name of your movie, because WWW movies should be named in such a way that all your viewers can access them.

NOTE: For QuickTime movies to be used on the web, you should normally keep movie names to eight characters or less, with no spaces, followed by ".mov". The ".mov" is very important ­ without it, the QuickTime plug-in may not play your movie properly. Your server may be case sensitive, so make sure to be consistent with your capitalization.

NOTE: If you change the name of your movie after Media Cleaner compresses it (which also makes the HTML), you will need to manually change the embed HTML to reflect the new name.


6. Preview your Results

While the movie is compressing, try moving the Before/After slider back and forth under the movie. The video to the left of the slider is the original source movie, uncompressed. The video to the right of the slider is the final compressed video. Notice how the image quality is somewhat degraded on the right ­ you are seeing the artifacts that occur when you reduce to a very low web data rate.

Let the movie compress until it is done, and the chime sounds.


7. Open the HTML File

Next, open the "Tutorial 2" folder. Notice that there are two different "T2" files. One is "T2.mov" and one is "T2.html".

Double-click on "T2.html" to open it with SimpleText. This is the text that you will use to embed your movie into your page. When you create a movie for use on a WWW page, the Wizard normally creates this HTML embed tag.


8. Paste Your EMBED Tag

Double-click the file "SampleWebPage.html" in the "Tutorial" folder on the Media Cleaner Pro 2.0 CD-ROM to open it. This is a basic web page we've created in which you can embed your movie. Copy the whole embed tag from "T2.html" and paste it into the large empty space in the middle of "SampleWebPage.html".

Use the "Save as..." option to save the modified file into the "Tutorial 2" folder. Name the new file "MyTest.html".


9. Upload to Your Server

Upload "T2.mov" and "MyTest.html" to the top level of your HTTP server. If you don't know how to upload files to your server, check with your system administrator, or server documentation, for details.

NOTE: If you aren't comfortable with uploading files, you can see what the results will look like by simply dragging and dropping the "MyTest.html" onto your browser's icon on the desktop.


10. View the Results

Open a QuickTime compatible browser (such as Netscape Navigator 3.0 with the QuickTime Plug-in installed). In the "Location" field, type the path to the top level of your server, followed by "/MyTest.html".

For example, if you would normally type

http://www.aol.com/members/JoeCool

to get to your site, you should type

http://www.aol.com/members/JoeCool/MyTest.html

Once you've found the new page you've created, you can watch the movie you compressed. Notice how it starts as a QuickTime icon, then downloads as you watch. On a slow connection (like a modem) it takes a while for the black bar to move across under the movie. This bar shows how much of the movie is loaded at any point.

You can press the play button to start watching it, or wait until enough is loaded that it will start playing on its own if you selected the "Start playing automatically" option in the Media Cleaner Wizard interview.

Remember that the movie does not have a sound track, so it will be silent.

NOTE: If your movie doesn't display at all, you may have a naming problem or other server issue. Please see Appendix C for details. You can also click on the text that says "MovieHelp" in the sample page to go straight to Terran's online configuration help page.


11. That's It!

You've now compressed a WWW movie and successfully embedded it into your web page. Congratulations!

Go back to the top of the page