iLife Tutorial: Add a greeting with your iSight Camera in iWeb

Video is taking an increasingly important slice of our interaction with the web and if you’re blogging, you should seriously consider adding video content as well. You could record what you have to say using your camcorder and edit the footage in iMovie, using fancy titles and special effects, but sadly, our lives are very busy and most of us don’t have the time to do this. This doesn’t mean that you have to ignore video and stick to text and images for your site, however.
Millions of you own either a laptop or an iMac and these machines are ideally suited to this task because they come with a built-in camera, the iSight. Coupled with the media-friendly iWeb application, you have at your disposal everything you need to record a short welcome message for your site – or anything else, for that matter. This tutorial will show you how to achieve this.

1: A Movie page
You can add a video to an existing page or create a new dedicated one. For this exercise, click on ‘Add Page’ and select a Movie page.

2: The Movie widget
Click on the Media sidebar’s Widgets tab and drag the ‘iSight Movie’ widget onto the page’s video placeholder. Don’t worry if the dimensions change.

3: Record your message
Click on the red ‘Record Movie’ button. You’ll have three seconds to prepare and the recording will start. Click on the same button to stop.

4: Re-recording option
If you’re not happy, you can click on the blue ‘Start the camera’ button to re-record your message. Otherwise, click on that window’s ‘i’ button.

5: Inspector parameters
This opens up the Inspector window’s QuickTime tab. From there, you can choose options like displaying playback controls and looping the clip.

6: Poster Frame
The Poster Frame slider lets you choose a frame to display while the video is loading should you prefer one that isn’t the same as the starting frame.

7: Rudimentary trimming
If you weren’t quite ready at the start or end of your recording, you can use the ‘Start and Stop’ sliders to trim your clip.

8: Publishing
Once you’ve finished and you’re happy with the look of your page, click on the Publish button (lower left of the interface) to upload your work.

9: Sharing
When done, iWeb will offer you choices: you can visit the site or announce it to your friends. This last option will open an email message for you to fill.