[Paulo Jan]

I know it sounds strange, but as God is my witness: take a 1.4 Gb. test clip in DV. Encoded with the default H264 setting. Result: 683 Mb. Take the default setting, copy it and disable frame control, in order to prevent deinterlacing (and leave everything else the same). Result: a 854 Mb. file.

[Paulo Jan]

[Rafael Amador] “Paulo,
You are a Pro. Stop using “Default presets” and learn how to customize them.
“

Oh, I did that :-). Problem is, the interlaced version takes more space than the progressive one. With the default preset, the resulting file takes 50% of the original. With the default preset, modified to disable frame control, it takes about 60% of the original.

Paulo.

[Paulo Jan]

Yes, this.

I thought of that idea (encoding to H264) after I went to bed last night, and today I’ve been doing some tests. It’s workable… I think. The only problems I’ve seen so far are:

-The default H264 encoding preset in Compressor outputs a progressive file (it deinterlaces automatically), which is a no-no in our case.
-File sizes aren’t as small as I expected. With the default H264 preset, the resulting file is around half the size of the original, which means that it’s still 10 Gb.
-Also, there’s the gamma shift.

We’ve also been asking around and found some companies with faster Internet connections that can give us a hand, etc., so I think we’re out of the woods. Thanks again to everyone who responded.

[Paulo Jan]

[Dave LaRonde] “I’d like to know what the client was thinking in the first place. The term “magic wands” comes to mind.”

It’s more like “OMG teh Internet is awesome!!! We can communicate and send files to peoples all around the world!!1!!11!” and getting used to that mindset, without realizing that some things are still too huge to be sent online. (One of the people involved in the whole scheme is a sound engineer, and he works regularly from Spain with studios in L.A.; of course, sound files aren’t the same than what we’re trying here… 🙂 ).

I’ll ask my producers tomorrow to research both the satellite link and the Fedex options. (And just from a merely academic point of view, I’m now curious now about what the people in the film/FX industry do: all those stories about studios in London or Australia working with editors and producers in Hollywood, FTPing each other files… Of course, I guess they have dedicated networks).

Thanks for your quick replies (and I meant it: thanks *a lot*).

Paulo.

[Paulo Jan]

Hello:

Thanks for your answer. Today I tried downloading the RSS feed of the DSLR Video podcast, opening it with a text editor and looking for the URL of the video file in order to download it “by hand”, and managed to do so without any problems. I’m using the same computer, same ISP, no changes in any firewall settings.

Then I tried downloading the same file again from iTunes, and it stopped halfway through with an “error -3259”. Apple’s support document says that it can happen (aside of firewall issues) “if you are using an older version of iTunes”, which I am (iTunes 9.2.1.5). If I have time, I’ll try installing the latest iTunes and see what happens.

Paulo.

[Paulo Jan]

[Jason Brown] ”
I’m not saying another format….DV NTSC is a pretty standard codec that most non-linear apps will be able to work with.

I’m saying another PHYSICAL delivery — get an 8GB flash drive and send it…or a portable hard drive. Single large files on DVD’s have presented issues for me in the past.”

Sorry, I wasn’t responding to you, but to the previous guy (Paul Jay). In the end, we split the video in several smaller files and burned another DVD for them. Haven’t heard from them yet.

[Paulo Jan]

Nope. I had them check the file size on their hard drive, and it was 3.94 Gb. Besides, nowadays almost all Windows XP installations are in NTFS. (And besides, our own Windows machine is in NTFS, and it fails too).

[Paulo Jan]

Forgot to mention: I already thought about it being a Quicktime reference issue, so I checked, and it’s not. The noise the client is seeing are basically random color squares, as if the video file was corrupted.

[Paulo Jan]

It plays great in Mac, any Mac.

Send it to the client in another format… Great suggestion, except for this little detail: which other format can be read with certainty by any Windows machine? Uncompressed AVI? Too big. A DVD? WMV? Let’s remember: we’re talking about editing formats here, not delivery formats. At least with Quicktime you can be sure (well… until today) that, if you exported it in one of the codecs that come with it by default, any machine with Quicktime installed can read it.

[Paulo Jan]

You can always import it into After Effects, use “Interpret footage” and then step field to field (or frame to frame), to see if you perceive any artifacts.