User-friendly way to share large video files?

November 4, 2011 9:03 AM

User-friendly way to share large video files?

We have approximately a terabyte of non-commercial, archival video footage that is of interest to perhaps a dozen people worldwide. Step one -- converting the various legacy tapes to movie files -- is successfully underway. However, the individual files are too large and too numerous to send via e-mail. The quality of the video is generally excellent, and we'd like to avoid anything that degrades the quality (like Youtube).

What user-friendly options are there to distribute these files to the interested parties? Filesharing services (seems less than ideal for those persons who aren't techie enough to take the files and write to their own DVDs)? Do we need to mail physical DVDs?

Open to both general and name-specific solutions.

posted by vers to Technology (9 answers total)

Have you considered Vimeo? Much better quality available there than YouTube.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 9:05 AM on November 4, 2011

Best answer: Blu-Ray discs can hold about 46GB on the larger-sized discs, and about 19-20GB on the "regular" discs. Of course this would require any client to have a blu-ray drive to read the disc but is how our HD footage is stored at work. Rarely do we send full discs to clients.

Usually they ship us a hard drive and we fill it with requested shots, which is shipped back.
posted by Khazk at 9:09 AM on November 4, 2011

Best answer: Unless you need everyone to have immediate access to everything at the same time, a paid Dropbox plan may suit you. Will you need to have more than 100GB of this video on hand at any one time, assuming you can take off something not necessary right now and upload something that is?
posted by griphus at 9:15 AM on November 4, 2011

Oh, wait, is there a reason you're not distributing these in a format that you can easily play on a Mac/PC media player?
posted by griphus at 9:16 AM on November 4, 2011

Best answer: There are filesharing services that will happily host a terabyte. However, it won't be cheap -- I'd estimate around $100/month just to store the files, plus more for downloads. Uploading will take weeks if your Internet connection is as slow as mine.

I'd favor a physical option. Hard drives may be cheaper than Blue-Ray in the long run since they're more reusable.
posted by miyabo at 9:16 AM on November 4, 2011

Best answer: Efficiently and cheaply sharing large amounts of data/video files is the holy grail of small video production companies, and I think at this time the only way to do it is to use hard drives.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:26 AM on November 4, 2011

Have you considered Vimeo? Much better quality available there than YouTube.

Huh? Youtube supports 1080p and even 4k video.
posted by delmoi at 11:29 AM on November 4, 2011

Unless you need everyone to have immediate access to everything at the same time, a paid Dropbox plan may suit you.

griphus, the free version limits you to 300 MB uploads at any one time (and actually less than that, AFAICT). Is this restriction lifted for the pro version?

If so, your idea sounds as immediately-accessible as youtube or vimeo - still mostly limited by upload + download times.
posted by IAmBroom at 1:45 PM on November 4, 2011

Response by poster: Thank you all for your input. We're going to go with copying the files to several hard drives that will be distributed among us. We'll then copy to thumb drives for those who are techie and only need partial files and player-ready DVDs for those who need plug-and-play. Many thanks!
posted by vers at 2:46 PM on November 6, 2011