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Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
Hi this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now. Today I want to show you how to send a video email from your Mac.
So I just came back from the New Media Expo in Las Vegas. And of course, there, surrounded by all sorts of video equipment and people talking about the future of video on the internet I wanted to send an email home. But I thought, wait a minute. Why am I sending an email with text in it? Shouldn’t I be sending video at this point? So I thought, well on a Mac maybe it’s easier than I think. So I looked into how I could send video email from my Mac and it turned out it was very easy. So of course I could have recorded video and edited it like I do this Podcast but I just wanted to send a quick email so I thought is there a program that can allow me to record video very quickly and send it as an email. QuickTime Pro came to mind but not everybody has QuickTime Pro and I wanted a simpler solution. Imovie but then you have to go through a bunch of steps of creating a movie and then exporting it. So I thought, maybe Photo Booth can do this. So I opened up Photo Booth and sure enough you can do exactly this.
Now to do this in Photo Booth is pretty easy. All you need to do is switch from the photo mode down here to the video mode. You get a video icon, you click it and you get a countdown and then you record your message. ‘Hi. This is a test video email.’ Press it again and it gets added to your little library down here. Click on it and it will play it back for you. Now that you have it selected you can click on the email button over here and it will launch mail and attach the video into a new message. There it is. I just type the to and the subject and I’ve got my video email. So that’s all you need to do to send an email from Photo Booth with a video in it. It’s very easy. But the disadvantage is the file is huge. It doesn’t do any special compression. So in my case I ended up with a 64480 video but it still took just under a meg for four seconds of video. If I wanted to record a longer message it would be huge so I wouldn’t recommend sending these video emails to anybody unless they have a very fast broadband connection.
Now, alternatively you can go ahead and recompress this movie. If you select it in Photo Booth and do command R to find the original file you can then open up another program. I can do it in QuickTime Pro, for instance. You might have to do it in imovie if you don’t have QuickTime Pro. Imovie’s going to be a little bit harder because you’re actually going to have to construct a movie with just that one clip and then export it. You can also use another program like ffmpeg x for better compression. I sent it as by 320 by 240 H264 movie and I lowered the bit rate to only a hundred kilobits per second which I think was fine for a little video email message. I also took the audio and set that to AAC, which is equivalent to MP3, at 32 kilobits per second so I ended up with only a 64k video which is very acceptable for my four-second video. But that was a lot of extra steps. Alternatively you could have recorded directly in QuickTime Pro or imovie and taken the few extra steps at that point to export a more compact movie.
Now I hope that in future versions of Photo Booth there’ll be some sort of way to automatically compact your movie into, say, a preset email format which would be similar to what I used. What will even be cooler is if there was an add video option in mail and then you could select that menu item, record a quick little video, it compresses it to a very small size, or maybe something in your preferences and you’ve got a video email. But until then the Photo Booth option’s a pretty good one.
Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.