Sometimes things work just like you expect them to. Sometimes they don’t. I like to call the latter “surprises”. For example, you’re using iMovie HD to edit the next hit reality show. You want to pitch your idea over the web and, fortunately, iMovie HD has an iWeb choice under the Share menu. You get everything cut down to just under 15 minutes, Share to iWeb and minutes later, you have your video laid out on a webpage just ripe for the Publishing. One click of the Publish button later, and you visit your newly created movie page. You see the QuickTime logo pop up and then you wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And... wait.

This isn’t quite right. Apple has movies all over their web pages and they NEVER take this long to load. Sure, your creation is 20 megs large but it should be showing you the movie while it’s downloading, not forcing you to wait until it’s finished. At this rate, potential investors may think you’re trying to sell them on the idea of, well, a blue Q.

See? That was a surprise! You didn’t expect your movie to behave quite that way! No, it wasn’t a happy surprise, but you were surprised!  Something in iMovie’s iWeb export fails to enable the progressive streaming of QuickTime, also known as Fast Start. Because of this, a viewer won’t see anything (save for the QuickTime logo) until the entire movie is downloaded. Since there’s no bar showing how much of the movie is left to download until it’s done, there’s no way for a visitor to know how long they’ll have to wait until they’ll be entertained.

This surprising problem is easily solved, though, by Sharing to QuickTime instead of iWeb, then building the page manually in iWeb.

Just choose Share -> QuickTime then select  to Compress movie for: Web. This will create a movie with the same size and settings that is used for the iWeb export except the QuickTime exported movie does Fast Start. Then all you have to do is create a Movie page and drop your movie into the page’s placeholder.

Don’t be surprised if, at some point in the future, there’s ANOTHER surprise that not too suprisingly will unsurprise the prior surprise, leaving it, unsurprisingly, nonsurprising. What does that mean?

I can’t tell, it’s a surprise!