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In keeping with my current trend of posting ridiculously easy tips and solutions, I thought I’d post a story about a recent client experience where we used an off-the-shelf solution that’s not always thought of as either cheap or easy. Here’s the situation: my client has videos that he needs to share with his clients in a far away land (LA), and he’d like to do this on his MobileMe website. Ideally, he’d like to have a webpage setup for each of his clients so that they could choose their clip by clicking on a thumbnail of the video, and each page should be limited to just those clips that a particular client would need to see. In other words, the same basic web-based client review process that just about every other creative pro would like to have.

Captain Obvious says…

I know what you’re thinking… “this would be a piece of cake using iMovie and MobileMe, or possibly even YouTube.” As it turns out, it’s not that simple, and it’s not as polished and professional as you might expect.

Or, you might be thinking “That’s something that Apple’s Final Cut Server is designed to handle!” You’d be right. You could also put all kinds of permissions, workflow rules, automation, and other nifty things in there as well. While you’re at it, you’d also want to add lots of Professional Services into the mix, too which is fine by me. It’s roughly equivalent to installing XSAN, plus some custom development for the website part. So, again not the best solution here. We want something that’s easy to install and easy to live with.

DAM to the rescue

While Final Cut Server could be a great solution for a larger, more complex situation and won’t fit here, we can still use a simpler Digital Asset Management system (aka “DAM”) to build a catalog and publish it to the web. There are lots of DAM’s out there, but probably the most commonly mentioned system is Extensis’ “Portfolio”. The documentation is pretty good, the software is easy to use, and since it’s used all over the place there are always people who can help (like Iris Professional Services, for example). It also has a nifty web publishing feature, which I’ll give you a quick look at here.

Let’s start by opening up Portfolio and creating a new Catalog. This could be specific to a particular client (or other way of organizing), or we could create a Gallery inside the Catalog as we did here. One thing that a lot of people don’t know is that Portfolio handles video, not just graphics files. When you create the Catalog, you can choose to tailor it for video by selecting it in the dialog box:

That will give us a new Catalog, and we can create a Gallery within it. For this example, we’ll create one and call it “Iris Design”, which will be the name of our fictional client. Here’s the screen so far, including the Gallery and some incredibly tasteful clips:

Let’s say that’s all we want to publish at this point. To do that, I select all the videos that I want from this Gallery just by clicking on them, then tell Portfolio to publish them. You can do this by either right-clicking (or control-click) on the selected clips, or pull down the NetPublish command from the “Catalog” menu:

Or:

You’ll be presented with the intro screen for Web Publishing:

Choose “Next”, then the next step is to choose a pre-formated template for the layout:

Click “Next”, then enter in some details for the page. I’ve set this up as the “Iris Design” review page, and included a link to Iris Professional Services on the bottom:

Click “Next”, then we’ll need to tell the system where we want to export the web files to. This part would require some knowledge about how your website is setup, where things are normally stored, etc. If it’s on MobileMe, you can connect to your iDisk and navigate to it via Finder. Or, if you can connect directly to your web server, you’d create a folder and stick it all in there. Here’s the dialogue box:

Here we navigate to a folder on my server. Let’s just assume that this is where I want it for now.

The path gets filled in as shown here:

Now just click the button marked “Export Webpages”. You’ll then get a screen saying that you’ve completed the export. If you click on the big button near the bottom (“Grace”), it will take you directly to the webpage you’ve created.

Cool! We’ve got a webpage with the Iris Professional Services logo and everything.

Let’s click on the button marked “GALLERY”, or on the “Click here” tag and see what we get:

That looks good. I’ve got little preview thumbnails, and all I have to do to review the clip is to click on one. Let’s click on the one marked “FiiMorph.mov”.

In the immortal words of Leonard Pinth Garnell, “That wasn’t so good now, was it?”. The page itself is OK except that the thumbnail isn’t showing up. Let’s fix that. In Portfolio, click the “Previous” button a couple times until you get to the “Detail” screen. It passed this screen up in the original process, applying the defaults. No problem though. We just want to change the value for “Image Options” to “Thumbnail”.

Go ahead and Export the webpages now, then click on the big button to see how the pages look. This one is much better.

That’s OK, but it really could be better. Let’s try a different template. Just repeat all the web publishing steps, or just use the “Previous” button until you get to the template choosing window. Let’s try one called “Showcase”:

That’s much better. I’ve got the entire gallery on the left, and I can see the detail of the selected clip on the right. If I click on it, it will play the movie for me. So there we have it. We’ve got a web page that you can use for reviewing video over the web, and the software cost you less than $200. Cheap and easy!

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About Iris Professional Services
Iris Professional Services is a computer consulting company operating offices in both Seattle and Portland. Businesses throughout the Pacific Northwest rely on our expert IT consultants for all their network IT support services.