How Easy is it to Get Video to Computer / Online Format?

If you want the video to be included in your Website, you'll need a FTP-client. I'm almoust sure, that there's no cell phone which includes FTP-access. But maybe there're cell phone providers, who give their customers the opportunity to send their videos to a special webservice.

Evrey camcorder, if miniDV, Hi8 or something else doesn't matter, should be able to send videofootage to the computer. It doesn't matter as well, if you do so by burning the footage on a disc or if you transfer it by firewire. When you got the footage on your computer, you can do almoust everthing with it. Before you upload the videos, you shoudl reduce the size of them. To do so, you can reduce the frames per second from 24 (NTSC; PAL has 25) to something around 15. You should also reduce the dimensions of the vdieo (for example 320x240 pixel) and also the bitrate to 600 or less. The filesize, you should aspire is ~2 MB per minute of the video.

The most common streaming-format ist the Microsufts WMV-standart. Real Media (rm) and QuickTime offer better quality with smaller filesizes. Unfortunaley those two standarts require additional software while every PC and MAC is able to read the wmv-format.

Before we can get more specific we have to know, which hardware have you and what you want to do exactly.



Oh ... it's a pity ... but HEY, what are thinking about us?

Thanks, Mashlin.

That was very informative and exactly the info I needed. Some of the websites I was finding in doing research made it sound so much more complicated.

I've built a site for people to participate in an American Idol style auditions/ Online karaoke contest which will involve me having to upload the video's they send me. It seemed like the technology was finally to a point of being fairly common and easy for the average person, but I wanted to make sure.

BTW, the last line was just to divert some of the usual funny pants on this forum. Nothing personal.