Port Washington Premiere

[sniper_spike]

Ehh, a 700mb Xvid/DivX video is not sufficient enough for live action. However if this was some anime or cartoon, it would be fine, but in my opinion it's not good enough for real humanzz. A 1.4GB video is still not even close to so-called "DVD quality," so people would still be encouraged to get the DVD. Especially because it's an Indie film (you gotta support those Indie film makers!)
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File splitting is nice for those people who want to encode the video to MPG1 and burn to a VCD. If you want to burn it on a DVD, then simply rejoin the video files.
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DMZ is not a good idea, you don't want hacker attacks.
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I could seed too, only during nights though.

Edit: Reading through your post and mine again, I just realised (conciously) that this movie is going to be released on DVD. A lower video quality would be better to encourage DVD sales...

So in other words, timmeh's right, and forget what I said!

[Sparkfist]

host it on POD or jeff's site. i can't use bittorent either because of the firewall

Open the ports 6881-6999 in your firewall\router (open your listen port too, if your using a client* that has one), and open the client* to internet access through your firewall. Bam, problem solved.

*bittorrent client (program) eg. Bittorrent, Azerous, Bitcomet, etc.

Best to only open 6881-6884, they are used most. All the others are just open doors for intruders.

As for those of you out there that have high speed internet (DSL included), get bittorrent and that will work. It could take up to a week, in a few cases more. However you get the file and it's not a big drag on your bandwidth, so your ISP doesn't choke your download.

And as for DVDs, really get some. I bought some DVD-Rs from Staples, a 50 pack for $5, that's 0.10 cents each. If you don't have a DVD burner, go get one their as low as $40 (internal), and all you need to run it is; Windows 2000 or better (insert laugh), linux 2.4, OS 10.2 (or better). Not hard or expensive.

[totokan]

$40? Staples has one for 19.99.

[Triton]

Ehh, a 700mb Xvid/DivX video is not sufficient enough for live action.

O.o you must have high standards! i have monty python and the holy grail using divx 5 at less than 400mb at about 640x480 resolution 30fps etc its perfectly watchable both on my pc and gp2x!

EDIT: silly peope changing posts, this makes little sence now!

[loup]

some of you are talking avout dvd quality like this is some pristine picture filmed on hollywood calibre equipment and digitally processed for maximum picture enhancement. i have a feeling the finished product is actually slightly below typical "dvd quality". not that that is bad or anything; im not saying that the the quality is crappy - just that making this into a 3gb file is incredibly excessive, considering you are going to try to distribute it online.

I kind of already took that into concideration, if it was true DVD quality it would ring in at about 8GB

[timmeh87]

*shrug*. true. if its mpeg2.

[Reploid Ayla]

700 megabyte xvid is fine with me.

if you want dvd quality then buy his dvd and rip it...

but for an online release I think any independant filmmaker would agree that is suitable. it is about getting the film out more than j-oing to picture quality...

[benheck]

OK I gotta get some sleep, but thought I'd post a bit more info.

Port Washington was filmed and is edited / output in DV format, specifically Pinnacle DV, although it's for all intents and purposes the same as Microsoft DV codec.

DV codec exceeds "DVD quality" by quite a bit, going by data rate alone it's about 5 times the detail. DV does not use variable compression whereas DVD does. Thus, a DVD can use higher data rates for motion-intensive scenes, such as an Orc Assault, while DV has a much higher rate in general and therefore doesn't need to change based off the scene contents.

However DVD and DV have the same frame size, 720x480, non-square .9 pixel aspect ratio.

This is a tricky thing because for the live premiere I don't want to use a DVD as it'd be several steps DOWN from the source, and blown up to a big screen. I may run the movie real-time off a powerful laptop, full DV quality codec.

Anyway, back to a Web Premiere. I want something simple, a single AVI or MOV, not connect the dots with an audio and video stream separate (as with a ripped DVD as those use separate, non-compressed audio tracks) This isn't just for tech people, but anyone who cares to download it. It has to just work. Bittorrent is fine, although I am not at all familiar with it. Again, any file on that should also be the simple one.

We (that is, whomever all can host it) should agree on a format and a target size for the file. Then I can produce this file and physically mail discs to people for them to upload.

Things to consider:

*Check the data rate of a format. It usually goes by kilobytes a second, ie, DV is around 4,000k/second. VCD's (think crappy pirate Asian bootlegs) conversly run about 128k/second (same as CD audio) DVD is, on average, between 600k-1200k.

*Multiple data rate by 5400, the number of seconds in a 90 minute movie.

*Keep adjusting or looking at new data rates until a reasonable file size (I'd say 750 meg to 1.5 gigs) can be found.

* Sorry, but since we're talking about a downloadable movie we have to pretty much consider anyone with a modem/slow DSL to be out of the picture. Let's assume people getting this have a 3 meg cable modem or better.

*The music here on my end is going really well (probably has something to do with the 14 hour days I've been putting into it), so I'd say for the premiere, it'd either be the weekend of the 17th or 24th in March. So because of shipping discs / uploading eating a week off the remaining time we need to decide on a format soon.

*All hosted instances of the movie file will be linked to from my homepage.

*If you can host the file, LET ME KNOW at benheck@charter.net. Along with the normal traffic this site can't handle it, so I need help. In a first month or so it'd be really easy to see 500-1000 downloads of this, so it needs to be spread out as best we can. If you have anything to promote on your site this can help.

Altright, eyelids are failing on me, catch ya'll tomorrow!

[sniper_spike]

host it on POD or jeff's site. i can't use bittorent either because of the firewall

Open the ports 6881-6999 in your firewall\router (open your listen port too, if your using a client* that has one), and open the client* to internet access through your firewall. Bam, problem solved.

*bittorrent client (program) eg. Bittorrent, Azerous, Bitcomet, etc.

Best to only open 6881-6884, they are used most. All the others are just open doors for intruders.

As for those of you out there that have high speed internet (DSL included), get bittorrent and that will work. It could take up to a week, in a few cases more. However you get the file and it's not a big drag on your bandwidth, so your ISP doesn't choke your download.

And as for DVDs, really get some. I bought some DVD-Rs from Staples, a 50 pack for $5, that's 0.10 cents each. If you don't have a DVD burner, go get one their as low as $40 (internal), and all you need to run it is; Windows 2000 or better (insert laugh), linux 2.4, OS 10.2 (or better). Not hard or expensive.

Most used yes, but I read the new version of Bittorrent uses the ports all the way to 6999.

@Ben: You must have downloaded some pretty funky DVD-rips, the audio is usually combined with the video, and in AC3 or MP3.

Also keep in mind that bitrates (or quality of movies\audio) are measured in kilobits, not kilobytes (bitrate, not byterate). So as DVDs are 600 kilobytes - 1200 kilobytes a second, in their real measurements they are 4800kb\s - 9600kb\s (1 kilobyte = 8 kilobits). If someone entered 600 as their bitrate, they would have one pretty crappy MPEG2. 'Best to keep standards as so not to confuse anybody (like me for one ).

[gannon]

I'd say that it would be good to have 2 versions, a compressed one and a larger and higher quality file. I would prefer mkv or ogg for the compressed one, but I know most people don't have that so something more common like divx might be better.

[blackbox_dev]

This movie looks good. Just saw the trailer! Anyways, bittorent is more suited for large files. So, it actually wouldn't take to long to download a 3gig file if there are a lot of seeders and no leachers.

To ben: seeders are people who keep downloading the file after it is on there computer to upload it to other people. leachers just download it and exit the program, not the way bittorent is supposed to work.

so have a 3gb file on bittorrent and then say maybe a 700mb-1gb file on POD.

As for video format? Don't ask me. I have no idea.

(hey an entire post without a smiley woops too late)

[bicostp]

Please, I'm almost begging here, do NOT use bittorrent (at least not exclusively!)! It won't work for those of us with sufficient network security, and as I said before any router changes for me are out of the question. And don't tell me "oh just open ports duhdeedum-deedeedee", because my dad won't change anything, and even just opening those ports creates security vulnerabilities.

If possible, I'd recommend against using traditional Quicktime .mov compression; it produces relatively large files. I used QuickTime 7 Pro to encode the trailer as an MPEG4, and it came out at under 5 megs. I can't really see any noticeable compression artifacts.

But you guys be the judges. <a href="http://bicostp.portablesofdoom.org/uplo ... p4">Here's the MPEG4 version. (4.5 MB)</a>

[Skyone]

Bic, how big do you think the file will be?

[bicostp]

Using the same encoding I used for that copy of the trailer, probably something like 300 megs. (but there is still evident compression)

I think the best thing to use would be H.264, like the HD trailers on Apple's website. However it has some hefty system requirements: 2.0 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or faster processor, At least 512MB of RAM, 64MB or greater video card, Windows 2000 or XP, and Quicktime 7. And that's for the 480 version (smallest). But if you want to have quality Quicktime video, this is the way to go.

We could always do a DiVX AVI file or something like that, but I don't know what the file size will be.

[totokan]

Using the same encoding I used for that copy of the trailer, probably something like 300 megs. (but there is still evident compression)

I think the best thing to use would be H.264, like the HD trailers on Apple's website. However it has some hefty system requirements: 2.0 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or faster processor, At least 512MB of RAM, 64MB or greater video card, Windows 2000 or XP, and Quicktime 7. And that's for the 480 version (smallest). But if you want to have quality Quicktime video, this is the way to go.

We could always do a DiVX AVI file or something like that, but I don't know what the file size will be.

xviD is as good as Divx, most of the time better quality. If it's going to be between 700mb-1.5Gb, it should be on an FTP, easier then a HTTP download for that size of a file. Of course, you could RAR it into 40 parts or so of ~20 MB...