Getting Small with E-mail Movie and Web Movie
The first two options, E-mail Movie and Web Movie, are what I will cover in this article. The E-mail Movie setting makes the smallest online video. For my example of roughly a minute of video with music, the E-mail Movie setting will convert my 235 megabyte edited footage down to roughly 600 kilobytes. You may not know a megabyte from a kilobyte but that is a huge difference in size. The compromise is that the image size, at 160 pixels wide by 120 pixels tall, will resemble a digital postage stamp. The frame rate is also limited to 10 frames a second, one-third the 30 frames per second that you find with traditional television.

The small Web movie settings offer a nice balance between file size and image quality.

The Web Movie setting, obviously, is probably your first choice for Web video. At 240 pixels wide by 180 pixels tall, your video size is not as diminutive. The frame-rate also steps up slightly higher to 12 frames per second so that your motion is a little more true to the original. Unfortunately, Web Movie also uses a stereo sound setting. For most streaming video these days, it would be more productive to use your limited resources on better picture quality versus stereo sound. Stereo sound is not going to make that big of difference with the majority of your edited videos. All together, my Web Movie example weighs in at 1.1 megabytes for a little over a minute of running time. That is roughly twice the E-mail Movie in size but more than one two-hundredths of the size of the original edited video.

As I mentioned earlier, QuickTime is a system or architecture for handling digital media. As part of that system, there are different ways of converting (or encoding) your edited movie into something smaller for use on the Web. Both E-mail Movie and Web Movie use a mathematical formula (what professionals would call a codec) to make the video smaller. The codec used for the video part of your edited movie is called H.263. As codecs go, it does a reasonable job for this type of work. It makes the video small and works well with slower Web connections. It does especially well if there is a lot of motion in your streaming video. But QuickTime does offer more powerful options under the Expert setting for you to explore later.

QuickTime fans will notice that I am skipping over the QuickTime streaming option. I am doing so because QuickTime streaming servers are still not as common as other options. But if you do have access to one, I would encourage you to explore that solution.

You may have noticed that I did not state a preference for E-mail Movie or Web Movie. I encourage you to export your edited video to both settings and see which one is more practical. Check the size of the file. If it is above 5 megabytes, I start getting really nervous that a dial-up user is not going to want to watch the movie. For longer videos, E-mail Movie may offer the only file size that is practical for a dial-up modem user. If you need to, make your movies shorter and more focused on a particular topic. Your audience will be happy that you did.