Sending movie files over the internet
Preparing and sending files through the internet takes extra time. You will have to take this into concideration so you don't miss the deadline.
A 4 minute DV film uses about 800 megs of space. Most home hi-speed internet connections upload slower than they download ( 1/3 to 1/10 the speed ). If you try to upload a 4 minute film at it's original size at say 85k/sec it will take almost 3 hours.
It's possible to get a 4 minute film ( 640x480 @ 30 frames/sec ) down to 100 megs or less with good quality by using Mpeg4 compression. 100 megs would take about 20 minutes to upload on a standard DSL connection.
Your speed may vary. It's a good idea to test your upload speed before the last day.
We recommend compressing your movies with some kind of Mpeg4 compression.
Mac Quicktime 6 - MP4
Mac Quicktime 7 - H.264
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/
PC - DIVX or XVID
http://www.divx.com/divx/download/
You should also compress the audio to save space. Four minutes of uncompressed audio would take up 40 megs alone.
Possible Compression Settings
Video size - 640 wide - 480 high
data rate - 2 megs ( 2000k ) per second
Audio Compression - Mpeg-4 Audio or AAC (Apple)
Sample Size 16 (bit)
Sample Rate 22.05kHz - 44.1khz
Mono ( or stereo if the sound is important )
You may decide to use other compression methods or settings that work for you to get the file size down and keep the quality up.
Sending Files
A 100 meg file is too large to send via email. Email will only send a 5-10 meg file without bouncing. We're assuming you know how to send files via FTP. If you don't know what FTP is then you should use a web based file upload service like http://yousendit.com . Yousendit will send a file up to 100 megs free. Anything larger and you will have to pay for a premium service.
If you have your own FTP server please email us the location, username, password once your file is uploaded so we can download it.
If you would like to use our FTP server please email us to request a user account and password as soon as possible. Please try to keep files close to 100 megs. Email us as soon as your file has finished uploading or we won't know it's there.
email address: darryl@hardliquorandporn.com