Edit, Store, Share Videos, Photo Slideshows on TV, DVD

At the Consumer Electronics Show 2006 [1 2 3], several companies showcased software and services to perform video backups, video editing, online video sharing, creating photo slide shows for the TV or burning it on a DVD. Here’s a quick roundup of CES 2006.

Sharing small Vidoes
HP announced the new Snapfish Home Movie Service that aims to make it just as easy to share videos online as snapfish.com does photos. For $2.99 a month, you can put your videos in the same albums as your photos for friends and family to watch. Clips are limited to 10 minutes, but you can upload an unlimited number of them.

Sharing large Vide files by uploading
Streamload, an online storage service like XDrive, announced a new MediaMax service that imposes no limits on file size or quality. Though music or pictures can be uploaded, Streamload is more suitable for sharing video with your friends. You must upload movies to Streamload’s servers to share them.

Photo Slideshows on DVD
Simple Star provides software to Shutterfly, Comcast, or Kodak. Simplestar announced a $10 add-on to the software that allows you to burn a DVD of your slide show. You can choose among 300 songs for your soundtrack. If you’d prefer, you can also order a DVD online. Video clips can be included, but are limited to 15 seconds.

Editing Home Videos
If you looking to edit your home videos, try Pictureal. It makes many decisions about what to keep, and uses face recognition to help you later find scenes with your favorite actors (or family members). Pictureal has a service whereby you Fedex your tapes, and the company produces a polished DVD from them.

Sharing Video Files without uploading
Grouper, a free service, gives you the option of sharing video directly from your PC or uploading it to its servers. To use Grouper, you must download a small application. With it you can import video from your camcorder, create short movies (“Groovies”), and then choose either public or private sharing. You can download the movies to your iPod or Playstation Portable, or link them to your blog.

Choose the right Video Format
Before you can put your video on the Web, you must do some serious compressing. A good video editing program will let you squish the videos and convert them to the right Web format: Windows Media (.wmv), QuickTime (.mov), or Flash (.swf). Your video editor should offer presets for various connections, too; pick a slow frame rate and/or a small playback window size, unless you’re certain that viewers will be using broadband connections. Microsoft Windows Movie Maker video editing program for Windows XP will automatically encode the video and upload it to a video-hosting service such as Neptune MediaShare or MyDeo.

You Tube, Ourmedia, and Google Video are some of the best video hosting websites that host your video on the Web for free. Pictureal | Grouper | Streamload | Snapfish | Simple Star

If you are planning to put pictuers and home videos on a DVD always create a nice label. Avery and Fellowes provide downloadable DVD-label design templates.

Source: New Options for Editing, Sharing Video | New Ways to Wrangle Video and Photos | The Best Ways to Share Videos on the Web or DVD