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Using The On-Demand Producer for Your First Internet Movie

© Archie Sicat

I just finished a tutorial on how to use Microsoft's On-Demand Producer so I would like to share with all of you Internet Movie enthusiasts some lessons I learned. I am doing this in the hope that I will be able to help many of you who are still struggling with unleashing their first short movie on the Internet.

The On-Demand Producer is a great tool for "mass-producing" your work for streaming on the Internet. Let's stop here for a while to explain what we mean by streaming media. Briefly put, streaming media is a great alternative to having your site visitors download your movie. You will agree that downloading is truly time consuming, and even downright torture for people who still can't migrate from the traditional dial-up Internet connection. By streaming your film, your work is immediately there on the website, thanks to the "silent conspiracy" of multimedia servers and HTML servers working in the background!

So let's continue from where you probably are right now (I'm not a psychic, just guessing). Let's say you've shot your footages and done your editing. Now those footages are saved as a .AVI file on your PC's hardrive, a 15-minuter you are just dying to show the world. The On-Demand Producer, keep this in mind, has nothing to do with polishing your work. Instead, pick a great movie editor for that purpose. The main purpose of having the On-Demand Producer is encoding your work and subsequently publishing it on the Net.

Now how does one encode and why? Encoding is necessary so Microsoft can apply expert video algorithms on your work, making it efficiently "stream" the Net, no matter how slow some of your surfers' Internet connection is. For this purpose, you use the program's Save As Windows Media Wizard. Next, you have to publish your work to the website of your choice. So how does one do that? You have to use the program's Publish Windows Media Wizard, which will apply what is called redirection in order to organize your work in a form that multimedia and HTML servers on the Net will instantly recognize and play.

I will spare you the details of accomplishing the two major steps. I hate to reinvent the wheel when Microsoft has come up with a great tutorial under the Help menu of the program. I highly recommend going through it as it is expertly written (translation: very concise). The On-Line Producer is free, by the way, for downloading from the Microsoft official site.