Crackle used to be a video sharing website like any other called Grouper. Now, however, it's a slick new site designed to give aspiring filmmakers, comedians, animators and anyone else interested in working with film and video their shot at the big time. Crackle sponsors contests with incredible prizes, including pitch meetings with studio executives at Columbia and Sony Pictures Television, $15,000 development deals, and chances to perform at world-famous comedy clubs – in addition to having all the regular features of a video sharing website.
Free
You retain the rights to your work, but Crackle has the right to modify, reproduce, use, edit, and copy whatever you post, and they can pass on this right to anyone they choose. Your work should not contain anything that infringes copyright of any kind.
You need to provide an email address, username, password, date of birth and your gender.
Crackle allows you to upload multiple files simultaneously. Once you pick a file to add, Crackle will prompt you to enter a title, description, and tags. You'll also need to choose a channel for your video, as well as set it to private or public. The upload is quite fast and displays not one but two progress bars, showing the number of MB uploaded, the number left, the percent finished and the estimated time remaining. Once uploaded, it will take a little while for your video to convert to Flash format before you can see it.
Crackle requires you to add tags or searchable keywords so that people can find your video more easily. Separate tags with commas.
Crackle accepts files in MPEG-2, MPEG-4, .wmv, .mov, .mpg, .avi, .3gp, and .asf format. Files should be under 100MB. Crackle recommends uploading with at least an 800kbps bitrate, and using the following settings to ensure your video is the highest possible quality: For Macs, compress as a .movfile, with the video codec and AAC audio codec. For PCs, compress your video as a .wmv file, with the WMV9 video codec and WMA9 audio codec. A size of 640x480 for videos shot with a 4:3 aspect ratio and 584x480 for videos shot with a 16:9 aspect ratio will work best in the Crackle video player.
Crackle makes sharing incredibly easy. At the bottom right of the video player are little links saying Share and Publish. Clicking Share allows you to enter email addresses and a short message to send the video to your friends. Clicking Publish displays a Permalink URL you can copy and paste to link to the video elsewhere, shows HTML code you can copy and paste to embed the video in another website, and also displays icons for Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Yahoo, Friendster, Piczo, Wordpress and del.icio.us you can click to enter your username and password and automatically post the video to your profile on that site.
