In case some of you aren’t reading all the feedback or may have missed it, I’m putting in a request for a small file of your trailer. At the rate of three hours per trailer it takes for Daniel Bates in Iraq to watch he’ll be hard-pressed to get through in time for judging. Some of you may not have the time to help, but if you do, it would be much appreciated. You may post links here.

Thanks!

Missed it somewhere, how do we get it to him ? By posting on YouTube, he can get low rez.. is that enough ?

I used mpg4 multimedia and got a 7.5mb file. It's pretty small, but I watched it and thought it looked fine. Thought I'd upload it to YouTube or Vimeo and then post the link here.

It's up to everyone whether or not they want to sacrifice size and quality. I was on dial-up, a faster connection than Daniel has now, for long enough that the frustration of waiting on something to buffer was more trouble than it was worth.

EDIT: Just watched the tiny file on Vimeo--it doesn't look too hot. Maybe, if Daniel doesn't mind, we could send them by email.

I hate to step on anyone's toes who wants to compress their own small version, but if you're interested I took a crack at recompressing the films released thus far. The HD versions I grabbed from my browser's cache provided good quality starting material, and although I had to resize them down to 320x176 to optimize the filesize/quality ratio, I'd say they look pretty good for five megabytes each. I tried lower bitrates, but this seems to be about the sweet spot for the given material. The audio is still clear, which I think is most important.

The eight files (that's intentionally leaving out Daniel's own submission, for obvious reasons) total 38 megabytes or so, which is only slightly larger than a single two-and-a-half minute HD file delivered by Vimeo or Youtube. If it's all right, I can upload the collection to a service like Sendspace (http://www.sendspace.com/), which I've had success with in the past, or send them direct to whoever I need to. Would that be a problem with anyone?

No problem from my end. It's great of you to help out like that.

Bruce Foreman

I just started to recompress mine and it should be about a 7 meg file. But if you've already grabbed the file Robert, then I won't bother posting it.

Are you kidding??? I think that would be fabulous, Robert!!! You're a gem.

So are you other guys for helping out. :)

Excellent! I'm just fiddling with some things now to see if I can't make the files Quicktime compatible (currently they only play with something like VLC or Windows Media Player with ffdshow installed, it's a quirk of the way QT deals with h.264) and squeeze a bit more quality out of them. Shouldn't be long now, I'll report back when they're all finished and ready to go.

Would you like the links to the last five trailers now?

Sure, if you don't mind; I'll be able to collect everything in one big zip file for easy distribution.

E-mail sent! Thanks again. :)

Thanks Robert!!!

You're welcome, everyone, I'm glad to help out; the hours I've wasted in front of this computer messing around with compression tools and techniques have to be put to use sooner or later, right?

Here's the 61MB DVC 17 collection (posted with Lorinda's permission), minus Daniel's submission to save him the trouble of downloading his own movie: http://www.sendspace.com/file/y1vq8b Ads are annoying, I know, but you can just scroll down toward the bottom to find the download link. No waiting, no codes to enter, just right click and save as.

Robert, great job !!

Right on robert!

Wow, you guys are awesome!

Tonight's mission was cancelled, so I had enough time to scrounge up a working computer and wheedle some Internet time. I watched most of the trailers before leaving the office, so I was able to catch the last three just now.

Again, thank you all very much for going to all this trouble. It's yet another reminder of why DV Info is the best community on the Internet!

That's what we're here for, Daniel, glad we could help! It really wasn't any trouble at all. Beyond the few experiments I had to do to test Quicktime compatibility, and the time to set up the batch of encoding jobs, everything else was fairly automatic. I'm just sorry I didn't know there were only three you hadn't seen yet; you only would have had about fifteen megs to download if I'd just converted those.