Help a starving film student in your neighborhood today!

[AnotherDamnNewbie]

Okay, so this seems to be the "creativity" part of Rorta rather than Music Movies and the Written Word, so I'm pretty sure this belongs here.

My situation: I've done a few film/video pieces this year in an aborted attempt to cobble together a film portfolio so I can go to art school in the West Coast, run into Quentin Tarantino at a party, become his successor, and garner more wealth and large-chested women than you can possibly imagine in a million years (yeah, I've thought this out.) To make a long story short, the portfolio never quite materialized last/this year, but the work I managed to do for it remains, and some of it (one piece in particular) is pretty damn good if I do say so myself. I was wondering if anybody knew anything about webhosting *cough*mods*cough* and how feasible it would be for me to post the short film I made on the internet for literally tens of people all over the world to see.

The catch: The "short" film is 23 minutes long.

Yeah. :(

Since my experience with webhosting consists of exactly one half of a CCNA certification course, it didn't take me long to run out of places to look for decently affordable video hosting. As it is I don't know how I'm going to bring the filesize down to a reasonable level. But that bit I can figure out for myself, I just need someone smarter than me to help hook me with server space.

[DIzzIE]

A few free hosting possibilities to consider:

? You should be able to get the video down to about 200 MB or thereabouts (or going lower but bordering on poor quality). After that, split it into 20 10 MB archives and upload to a Gmail account (try using GmailFS (http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmail-filesystem.html) (for Linux) or GMail Drive (http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm) (for Windows) to make the uploading easier). The downside is that anyone will be able to delete your uploads, and that it?s an inconvenience to have to download 20 archive segments and then extract the video file, but at least it?s free.

? While on the subject of Google, a better option may be its beta Google Video (https://upload.video.google.com/) program. The upside is that it?s free and that there?s no size restriction, but the downside is that the video must be approved and as the program is currently in the upload-only stage, end-users are as of yet not able to download the videos themselves. Check out the FAQ (https://upload.video.google.com/video_faq.html) for more info.

? Similar to the Google Video project, but already in place is Ourmedia (http://www.ourmedia.org). The upload limit appears to be either unlimited or 5 GB, and there are no bandwidth restrictions. The service is also free, so this sounds like it may be your top choice :), flip through their various FAQs (http://www.ourmedia.org/mission/faq) for more information.

? You may also want to harness the potential of P2P. For instance, create a torrent file for your video and then distribute the file to various trackers. A guide on making/distributing torrents can be found here (http://btfaq.com/serve/cache/56.html) and here (http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:uhhju62r76AJ:home.quicknet.nl/qn/prive/romeria/tutorial.htm)
Hopefully one of these methods will work for you...

[Stone]

It's not the size of the file really, it's the bandwidth from so many people downloading it is the problem. Also, if we host something for you, then others will want the same treatment. With everybody wanting stuff hosted, we'll run out of bandwidth too fast. We'll host your torrent for you no problem though.

[DoctaD]

Ill seed it for ya for however long, if you decide to go with the torrent... my upload is nothing special, but the more the better.

(Well, since I updated Azeurus it has been fuckin' gay and wont upload or download anything... I downloaded ABC a few days ago so hopefully it'll work.)

[AnotherDamnNewbie]

Yikes! I almost drowned in the flood of helpful info there! Thanks a bunch guys. And thanks for the Ourmedia link dizzie, I've been looking for something like this for a long time.

As it turns out, the hard part apparently is getting the filesize down to a reasonable level. Normally I'd just snag a free AVI compression tool and that'd be that, but the editing center where I work is Mac only and has no internet access, so things like that get kinda complicated though. I'm working on it though. I'm gonna try exporting it as an MPEG-4 tomorrow (it takes a whole day at a time to render this beastly thing.) Wish me luck guys!

[AnotherDamnNewbie]

UPDATE: YESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYES!!!

I got a 23 minute video down to 67 MB. Audio quality took a bit of a hit, but not enough that I want to spend another 2 hours rendering it again tomorrow. Hopefully I'll have it up on a spiffy new Ourmedia account by the weekend. I sure hope you guys can play mp4 files...