Editing Digital Video with Windows Live Movie Maker (part 8) - Sharing Your Videos - Publishing to the Web

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.

Figure 19. From this simple interface, you can publish your video creation to the MSN Soapbox video-sharing Web site.

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.

Figure 20. MSN Soapbox isn't particularly well known, but it's a decent place to share videos.

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.

Figure 21. With a little add-on love, you can now publish videos to a sharing site people actually know about and use.

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.

Figure 22. YouTube's metadata requirements for uploaded videos are quite similar to those for MSN Soapbox.

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.

Figure 23. And there it is, in all its YouTube glory: your shared video.