If you’ve ever dusted off a tape camcorder or a DVD video camera full of raw footage from old home movies, you’ve probably had a lot of fun reveling in the memories—seeing, for example, what the kids used to look and sound like. Odds are that other people—like your grown kids and their grandparents—would enjoy seeing those clips, too. In short, you want to be able to share old footage.

Since iMovie debuted, the only way to do that was by creating a movie—you couldn’t share clips straight from the Event browser. Unfortunately, the only way to distribute old footage is by creating a movie project. You can’t share raw, unedited clips straight from the Event browser. Luckily, the process takes just a few steps, as described in Chapter 5.

As noted, email isn’t the ideal way to send movies, because they tend to be big, and your Internet service provider can limit the size of email attachments (in which case it won’t deliver your file). The exception is small movies, though even there you’ll have to dial down the dimensions—what you gain in convenience, you give up in quality.

To send a movie by email, click the Share icon in the iMovie toolbar, and then choose Email from the drop-down menu (or choose File→Share→Email). iMovie displays a dialog box like the one in Figure 15-1, top. It includes a thumbnail of your movie, and, underneath that, the movie’s duration (2:54, for example, for 2 minutes, 54 seconds). You can edit your movie’s title, description, and tags by clicking once in the text boxes. (Oddly, the original title shows up in your email’s subject line when you send the file.)

You can change the video’s dimensions, too, and therefore its file size, using the drop-down Size menu. iMovie offers three less-than-hi-def options for movies you want to email:

When you select a dimension, iMovie displays the resulting file size under the thumbnail. Notice that when you choose a size that results in a file larger than 10 MB, iMovie warns you to reconsider. That’s because the file will take a long time to transmit, and your email system may not let you send that big an attachment.

Once iMovie generates an email version of your project, it automatically opens your Mac’s Mail application and attaches the video to a message (Figure 15-1), though the description and tags are nowhere to be found. Enter the recipients’ addresses, type a personal word or two, and send away.

Figure 15-1. Top: When you share a movie via email, be sure to choose a resolution that works. Bottom: iMovie uses Apple’s Mail application to send your movie, automatically generating a message like the one you see here. Sharing from iMovie doesn’t work with browser-based email, however.

By far the easiest way to share your movies on the Internet is through YouTube.

YouTube is, of course, the insanely popular video-sharing website, filled to the brim with hundreds of millions of funny home videos, TV excerpts, amateur short films, memorable bloopers—and now your iMovie projects. Once you post a movie, other people can find it in many ways: by typing in its web address, by searching for your name, or by searching for keywords (called tags) you list in the video’s description.

The first thing you need in order to post to YouTube is a YouTube account (it’s free). To get one, visit www.youtube.com/signup and fill in the blanks. If you have a Gmail account, you can use that login information to sign in to YouTube. One signed into YouTube, be sure to click the Upload button at the top of the page and follow the brief instructions to create a channel for all your videos.

After the YouTube Movie Is Up

Once you post a video to YouTube, you can tell others about it simply by sharing the web address, which you find in the Video URL box beside your movie.

Figure 15-4. Newly posted YouTube videos aren’t available to the masses immediately.

You can manage your videos—rename, annotate, or remove them—by visiting the Video Manager page at http://www.youtube.com/my_videos (Figure 15-5).

Figure 15-5. The YouTube Video Manager is where you organize all your movies. You can change their privacy settings, edit their descriptions and tags, and even enhance them.

If you realize you made a mistake in an uploaded movie, you can delete it from YouTube and upload a new one. You can even upload the same movie multiple times, so don’t count on iMovie or YouTube to detect duplicates for you.

More than a billion people use Facebook every month. With that many members, the odds are pretty good that someone (everyone) you know has a Facebook account—probably one that’s checked frequently. For that reason, Facebook is a no-brainer when you want to share your videos with friends and family. It even plays HD videos, so your work can look its best.

Post to Facebook

When you choose Share→Facebook for your project, iMovie displays the screen in Figure 15-6. The steps for uploading to Facebook are basically the same as they are for YouTube and the sites mentioned on the following pages: Enter your account information, type in a movie title, description, and tags, and then choose a video quality.

Figure 15-6. Publishing your video to Facebook is basically the same as publishing to YouTube. The biggest difference is the privacy settings you have available. You can keep your movie to yourself or share it with friends, friends of friends, or all 500 million Facebook users.

Facebook lets you choose who can see your movie, too (Figure 15-6). You can make it an entirely private affair (click Only Me), share it with friends, friends of friends, or the whole world (Public). If you change your mind later, go to your Facebook timeline to find your video and then edit the sharing settings that appear when you click Edit This Video.

Facebook takes a few minutes to process your video before you can view it. As you’re probably aware, Facebook offers plenty of other ways to spend your time while you wait.

If YouTube is the McDonald’s of online video—ubiquitous, but full of “fast-food” movies—Vimeo is the Whole Foods, directed at those with a more refined palate. It’s still a video-sharing website, but the videos posted there tend to be of higher production values. The site also shies away from the cluttered look you find on YouTube. For this reason, people who are picky about how their videos look online tend to turn to Vimeo.

If you’re the Vimeo type, you can create a free account at http://vimeo.com/join. (You can also sign up for a Plus account, which, for $10 a month, gives you a bunch of additional benefits, like higher upload limits and more control over how your videos appear to viewers.)

Upload to Vimeo

Choose Share→Vimeo to upload your video. The Vimeo publishing screen (Figure 15-7) has the same Sign In button you saw on the YouTube screen.

As usual, be sure to enter a good description and tags so people searching the Internet will have more luck finding your video, and you can upload movies with resolutions of up to 1080p.

Vimeo offers several ways to limit who sees your movie, the most interesting being “Anyone with Password.” Enter a password in the box provided, and only the people you send the code to can watch your movie.

Figure 15-7. Uploading to Vimeo works almost identically to sharing to YouTube. The privacy settings are unique, however, since you can limit viewing to those with a password you choose.

When you finish filling in the dialog box, click Next to get the same copyright warning/scolding you see when you upload to YouTube. iMovie processes and uploads your video, displaying a confirmation message when it’s done.

Now that almost everyone carries around a smartphone, laptop, or camera, the big news agencies are wising up to the power of citizen journalism. These days, the first video you see of a natural or celebrity disaster usually comes from the Man on the Street™.

If the idea of citizen reporting excites you, make sure to take advantage of the convenience iMovie offers in sending your reports straight to CNN’s iReport website (http://ireport.cnn.com/).

iReport is CNN’s system of publishing video news from ordinary people like you. (Some of the photos and videos even make it onto CNN’s TV broadcasts.) The first time you visit the site, it gives you a brief explanation of how it all works (Figure 15-8). Follow the link in the top-right corner to create an account and get started.

Figure 15-8. Your first visit to CNN’s iReport website (http://ireport.cnn.com/) greets you with this message. Basically, CNN loves to take the great stuff you create, but it won’t take the blame for the bad stuff.

Upload to iReport

When you have your Pulitzer Prize-worthy report ready to go, choose Share→CNN iReport in iMovie and then select a resolution from the Size menu (Figure 15-9). CNN doesn’t offer any tag or description fields, but you can add that info on the iReport website. Click the Sign In button and enter your iReport account vitals (email address and password).

Unlike YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook, iReport doesn’t let you limit who can see your video. Everything you upload is public, viewable by anyone. (iReport is for public reporting, after all, not private video sharing among friends.)

Once you upload your report, you can see it online and tell friends about it. If you try to watch your report right away, you might see a message telling you that CNN’s servers are still processing the video.

Figure 15-9. The publish screen for CNN’s iReport has the basic options, except for the one to keep it private. This is news, people! (Your 1-year-old’s birthday doesn’t happen every day, right?) Be sure that what you upload is exactly what you want, because there’s no simple way to remove or update an iReport.

If you’re a savvy, webmastery kind of person, you can design a website and then post your videos without any help from iMovie.