Making a movie or vlog for Blogger

At the time of posting I've got a short example of a movie in my embedded Windows Media Player on the right hand sidebar (though this may not be the case by the time you read this). It's actually quite easy to do (otherwise I wouldn't have been able to do it). So what do you need? Either a digital stills camera with a movie mode or a digital video camera, a web hosting service and some software-in my case Windows Movie maker 2.1 (which is free) and probably already on your XP pc. For my example I used the movie mode in my stills camera which, even though it's low resolution 360x240 pixels will come out fine. You don't want or need a higher resolution anyway as the resulting file has to be as small as possible so that visitors to your page don't wait long for your blog page or movie to download.

First step. After downloading the movie from your camera to your p.c. open Windows Movie Maker (Start/All Programs/Accessories)and "import video". This will work if your movie has the suffix .avi or .mpeg or .wmv. If your movie is in .mov file format (which is Quicktime and not supported) all is not lost as you can use software to convert it to a file format supported by Windows Movie Maker like .avi using one of these trials Mov Converter, Convert Movie, or the free MPeg4CamToAvi. Having converted the imported video ( if necessary) drag the video to the time line to begin editing. Effects, titles and cutting can all be done here. Excellent instructions on the editing here from Microsoft Movie Maker's website. When you're happy with the result save the output to your p.c. as a .wmv or .avi selecting 512 DSL (or lower) output quality to compress the file size. And that's all there is to it. Your movie is now ready to upload to your hosting service and play in the embedded Media Player.