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Digital camcorders and many digital cameras enable you to shoot video clips, pop them on your PC and edit them into a visual masterpiece in almost the blink of an eye. Thanks to the internet and the prevalence of broadband, it is easy to distribute your work to a worldwide audience. Not only that, but your movies could even earn you some money. The era of online TV has arrived, and here we'll show you how to get in right at the start.

Preparing video for the web

If you're not already editing your own video, check out the articles included on this month's cover disc, 'How to... Make a video for YouTube' and 'Making a movie on your PC'. When shooting a video specifically for the web, there are a few things you need to consider before you get to the editing stage.

Most online video is currently streamed at resolutions of 320x240. This is a massive improvement over the postage-stamp footage of a few years ago, but it's still hardly DVD quality. This imposes some constraints on what works well online.

The parallels are similar to television compared with film when the former was introduced. Partly because of its lower resolution, TV has traditionally tended to focus much more on talking heads than film does, with a lot more close-ups and fewer long shots. The same is also true of web-oriented footage. The resolution simply won't do justice to those beautiful landscape panoramas, so it's best to make your subject matter fill the screen as much as possible.

You should also remember that putting your videos on a site such as YouTube means they will face a public forum. If

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your video making is bad, there's a good chance someone will tell you about it, assuming they bother to watch it in the first place. Don't just point a camera at yourself and assume the results will be good. Write a script, and plan what you shoot in advance as much as possible.

For most video-sharing sites, shorter is always better. So try to come up with ideas for videos just a few minutes in length. Keep your editing as professional as possible, too, without making things dry and boring. This will help your productions stand out against the sloppily produced content that fills the internet. In the past you may have edited videos for friends and family, who will probably be reasonably forgiving of any editing foibles, but on a public video-sharing site your audience will be less generous. Always bear in mind who you are trying to communicate with and tailor your material accordingly.

Delivery formats

Before today's video-sharing websites came along you had to pay close attention to the video format you used for streaming, because it needed to be the right one for your chosen delivery mechanism. Despite increases in broadband speeds, you still can't simply stream the native files that camcorders create. MiniDV digital video runs at around 3.6MB/s, as does high-definition video. MPEG2-based standard-definition camcorders and the new AVCHD format are a little more frugal, but none of these formats can be streamed directly.

You therefore need to use a video format optimised for web streaming, such as Windows Media Video or Real Media. Many of the current big names in web video, such as YouTube, use Flash Video as their delivery mechanism. Only a few applications can actually encode in this format, however, so an intermediary is required.

This is not normally a problem, as most video-sharing sites accept video in all the common file formats and will convert the file to their preferred format automatically. This isn't the best way of maintaining quality, though, because having compressed your video once already to transfer it to the service, it is then compressed again. However, at least it means you don't have to worry too much about which format to use.