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You will notice, when editing your masterwork, that hard-drive space quickly starts to melt away like the Wicked Witch of the West. Do not be alarmed. Movies are bulky little beasts. Remember, what you're actually doing is transporting nearly 30 photo-quality pictures to your PC every second. Expect to lose a gigabyte of memory for every minute of footage; even on an iMac DV, you're going to be able to work only about 10 minutes at a time.
You might want to use the money you just saved on your camcorder for a CD-RW drive, which will burn your movie onto a CD. This is cheap, virtually limitless storage that runs about $2 per 650MB.
Once you've shot and edited your own private Citizen Kane, it's time to show it to an audience that Orson Welles never dreamed of--the Internet. There is no shortage of sites out there eager to screen your stuff; however, few have the bandwidth to allow you to upload it directly. You'll probably end up snail-mailing it to them, either as a VHS tape--which means lots of klugey connections from your computer back to your camera and into your VCR--or on one of the miniDV tapes that came with your camcorder. They don't come as cheap, though.
One of the best places to start is iFilm.com a popular site that is trying to do for home movies what MP3.com did for garage bands. iFilm promises to encode every movie it receives so long as it isn't pornographic, which will be a relief if your film is sex free but still sucks.
If so, it surely won't be alone. iFilm CEO Skip Paul, a Hollywood veteran, expects to see truckloads of movies--bad and good--turning up on his doorstep in January, as the DV Christmas effect kicks in. His site lists both the most viewed and the highest-rated films; getting your name in either is an extremely cheap way of generating some Hollywood buzz. "It's a meritocracy," Paul says. "We let people find a market, if Darwin so wills it."
Rival website AtomFilms.com which just received a comfortable $20 million in financing, offers a more elitist and aggressive approach. Atom rejects around 10% of the movies it receives. But if the site likes your stuff, you'll find yourself vigorously promoted to studios like Warner Brothers (owned by Time Warner, this magazine's parent company). The most popular content is downloaded 100,000 times a day. "You don't need to be a Hollywood big shot," says Atom founder Mika Salmi. "If the story is good, it doesn't matter if your production values or acting isn't great."
That's the true meaning of this DV Christmas; the whole process is wide open. Even rank amateurs can participate without splashing out too much cash. Let the big studios tremble as you unveil your vision. And if you do go running around in the woods, remember to press the steadycam button.
--With reporting by Greg Lindsay/New York