Using the internet to learn, produce and share video: psst, want to be in the movies? Forget that. Want to make movies?
Author: PSA Journal

Last year I received a video clip of a 30-second salmon commercial from a friend on the Internet. After I viewed this little gem and had a good laugh, I thought, "what makes this work and how big is the file." The file format was a simple MPEG format and was 1.4-MB file. This could easily fit on a standard floppy disk.

It was then I realized that Internet video was not that difficult. What used to require expensive, confusing equipment costing tens of thousands of dollars can now be done on a home computer. You can then output your masterpieces to videotape recorders, CD-ROMs and the Internet. In the near future, the cost of DVD recorders will open up a new area of sharing, showing and exhibiting video programs. Currently, recordable DVD is in the $500.00 price range. One year ago, these recorders broke the $1,000.00 price barrier.

In addition, editing video on your PC is so easy that if you can drag and drop sentences and paragraphs to edit a document, you can make your own multimedia movies and videos--complete with audio, special effects and titles. My first experience was with a Pinnacle Studio 400. After a few downloads of repair patches from their website, I was able to produce some basic videos. My problem was that I had the urge to go beyond the limited capabilities of a slow 166 Pentium computer with 32MB of RAM.

All you need is a reasonably powerful home computer (one of the more recent Macs or a Pentium PC that runs at over 700 megahertz), lots of memory (at least 128 megabytes, though more would be better) and a large-capacity hard drive or two (the bigger the better, but at least 10 gigabytes).