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iMovie Assistance Please (1 Viewer)

DaveF

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I can appreciate your confusion. It seemed so sensible last night. :) This is a hasty demo of a movie gallery created in iWeb 08. The code and links are that used. The particular movies are random clips I use for testing this.

Previously, we had to create a gallery of "posters" that were linked to individual movie pages; the movies loaded immediately with the page.

Here, you can have a gallery of movies all in one page, that are only loaded when they are clicked to be played. The particular clips I are a random grab to get something working. The code below is the code needed; I'm still working out the presentation of this.

The code came from an O'Reilly demo. As I hoped, you can use such code in iWeb 08's HTML Snippet feature.

This is the direction I wanted to go with my online video: gallery and playback all in one page. Thanks to Parker and Ken, I was able to find the right code. And the iWeb 08 upgrade lets me keep it within iWeb for now.
 

Ronald Epstein

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Dave,

It looks great. I love the way you can insert a quicktime file
within a poster frame.

Would love to do this, but alas, the time it would take to
experiment and figure this out would not be of benefit to me.

My biggest problem is TIME. I have so little of it after working
a day job and this forum. For me to sit down and figure out
exactly how to incorporate that coding to enhance next week's
CEDIA presentation we will be doing is impossible.

I thought we had fixed the problem of quicktime files automatically
loading/playing once the page comes up. I gathered if footage is saved
as WEB FILE rather than STREAMING FILE that the problem is solved.

Was I wrong about this?
 

DaveF

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We've got video that starts downloading immediately. But the user can begin playing without waiting for the entire video to load. This is like Apple's Trailer website: you can start playing almost immediately and the movie will continue to download in the background. I'm still amazed that this is so easy in iWeb; it's great.

But, the movie loads immediately without waiting for the user to click play. So it's probably not a good idea to put multiple 10 MB movies on a single page -- they'll all try to download at once.

This new approach gets it all together. Multiple movies on one page, and none download until the user clicks play. And then they download in the backgroud as it plays.

This second method provides IMHO a more elegant final result and is just what I want. But it does take a bit more work. I hope to spend some time this weekend on it, and maybe get a tutorial together so a person could get it going quickly with little experimentation.

You'll have to judge for yourself which method suits you better. :)

(If there were a practical way, I could help you produce the HTF video pages for your CEDIA conference, to help hash this out.)
 

Ronald Epstein

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Dave,

You'll have top excuse my initial response. As I keep pointing out,
I have a very short attention span and when I first saw the
iWeb QuickTime Gallery Demo I was like.....what?!

Now that I have a little more time to look it over, embedding that
code seems to be the easy part.

Just not certain what these mean....


Same thing here. Is that a directory already on my hard drive?
Perhaps created when I publish my iWeb content to my HD folder?

That's the confusing stuff. Otherwise, I like what this does!
 

DaveF

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Ron,

Hang loose. I'm going to get this together in a more sensible manner.

I've got new video from my Toastmasters club, so I'm going to work through this with iMovie 08 (looks promising) and streamline the flow. Between housework, boardgames, and BSG episodes, I think my wife will give me some time for computer stuff this weekend :)


One question: how do you publish your iWeb webpages to HTF? Do you use an FTP program and "manually" upload it?
 

Ronald Epstein

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Dave,

I am typing this on my iPhone so please excuse any errors.

Our CEDIA coverage starts next week and I'll be relying on
iWeb to upload video coverage.

I am scared stiff to use iMovie '08 only for the fact that when
we are under pressure to upload content within hours of an
event I don't have time to try to figure out the differences
from the '06 version.

Best thing you ever did for me Dave was tell me about CMD-T.
After that, iMovie was a cinch!

To answer your question...

I create a directory on my hard drive called (in this case) CEDIA.

I simply publish my iWeb content to that directory
and then manually upload the files via FTP.

I am not asking you to hold my hand here, David. I greatly
appreciate all your past support. If you have any suggestions
please continue to post them.
 

DaveF

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Ron, no problem. I want to make a tutorial on this -- for my own sake at least. But it won't be done in time for your immediate use. Here's a hasty overview, if you want to have at it. If not, you've got a movie-posting process that works well. You can always try this new way for a future event. :)

iWeb 08 is required. (in case that wasn't clear)

0) Pre-plan scripts and media folders
You will manually create, with your FTP program, a folder for your movies, thumbnails and javascript.

I use 2 folders:
shoutingman.com/iWebQT/Scripts
shoutingman.com/iWebQT/media

Yours might be a single folder:
hometheaterforum.com/htf/cedia07/video

1) Copy the script from the bottom my demo page to a text editor & edit for your website. This will be your HTML Snippet. (I'd add it here, but HTF runs the script and creates a inline video :))

Change all web references to your folder for movies, etc.
"http://shoutingman.com/iWebQT/Scripts"
"http://shoutingman.com/iWebQT/media"

to your location for video (for example)

"http://hometheaterforum.com/htf/cedia08/video"


Change the the two image size references to your video sizes; you add 16 to the height to account for the player controls :)

e.g. Change both cases of "160" & "136" to
"320" and "256" for 320 x 240 video
"640" and "496" for 640 x 480 video

2) Download these scripts and FTP them to your online video support folder
http://shoutingman.com/iWebQT/Scripts/AC_QuickTime.js
http://shoutingman.com/iWebQT/Scripts/loadMovie.js

3) FTP the video and thumbnail images into that same folder

4) Create movie page in iWeb
5) Click Web Widget->HTML Snippet (http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/#imovie-design-38)

Copy/Paste the HTML Snippet script into the snippet's floating edit pane.
Change the MOV movie filename to your movie filename
Change the GIF thumbnail filename to your thumbnail filename
Change the id="v1" reference to have its own id value. Each movie must have a unique id. Anything at all. Just different. I like "v1", "v2", "v3", etc.

6) Click Apply

7) If all the scripts, video, and thumbnail are already online, after a couple seconds, the Snippet box will appear right. It will show you the thumbnail image.

8) Create a snippet for each video, changing the movie, thumbnail, and "id" value for each.

9) Publish and upload.

10) Upload scripts, videos, thumbnails if you haven't yet.

It should work. If it doesn't work for me, I probably screwed up a pathname or web address, or didn't get my "id" values different.
 

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