decide how to handle raw video footage

[chadwhitacre]

So I did a short video interview over the weekend, and I'm working with the producer to get the raw footage, to be released when the edited version goes live on the website they're putting together.

I think what we want here is the raw footage, under a creative commons license (public domain, ideally). That would give anyone else the ability to create their own edit from this footage. The issue is that this is going to be gigabytes of data. It sounds like the best way to transfer this is to send them a hard drive to load up. Then where would we host it? Something like S3 or Dropbox, I guess?

I think we do want the raw footage.

IRQ because it's time-sensitive: we want to be able to release the raw footage when they put up the website.

[chadwhitacre]

The alternative (as I understand it) would be to have Covalent produce two edits: one long one for us, and the short one for the website they're making.

[chadwhitacre]

I think we're looking for one of these:

• http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

[chadwhitacre]

Brandon,

I'd like to pursue the hard drive option. My goal is to put up a page on my website with the footage as a YouTube embed and then a link to the full files for download. Can we use one of these two licensing options (preferably the first)?

• http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

I'm going to buy a drive for this and future projects like it. Do you have any rule of thumb for how much storage uncompressed video requires? This is suggesting ~8 GB/minute for 1080i/1080p. I guess at that rate a 2 TB drive would be good for 4+ hours of video. Sound right?

What should I know about drive formatting and PC/Mac compatibility? Is USB 3.0 acceptable? How important is drive RPMs? Will something like this work?

• http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ARJD56K/

Lastly, how much would you charge to also encode the footage in a format I can upload to YouTube?

Thanks! :-)

chad

[chadwhitacre]

It was great working with you, listening to your story and learning from you over our video session during Startup Weekend. If you're looking for the RAW, unedited footage, it might be best to get a portable hard drive from you and just transfer it all over to your drive, (although I wouldn't do this). The files will be very large. I would let us get it all together so you have the best of the best and give you that version that is optimized for size and handling. If you want the RAW - I won't stop you!

Let me know how you'd like to proceed. Have a great week!

[chadwhitacre]

Hmmm ... thanks for the options, Brandon. This is my first time doing something like this so I need to think it through. I've started a ticket about it:

#1608

[chadwhitacre]

Brandon,

I'd like to pursue the hard drive option. My goal is to put up a page on my website with the footage as a YouTube embed and then a link to the full files for download. Can we use one of these two licensing options (preferably the first)?

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

I'm going to buy a drive for this and future projects like it. Do you have any rule of thumb for how much storage uncompressed video requires? This is suggesting ~8 GB/minute for 1080i/1080p. I guess at that rate a 2 TB drive would be good for 4+ hours of video. Sound right?

What should I know about drive formatting and PC/Mac compatibility? Is USB 3.0 acceptable? How important is drive RPMs? Will something like this work?

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ARJD56K/

Lastly, how much would you charge to also encode the footage in a format I can upload to YouTube?

Thanks! :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Hey Chad,

We'll provide you the raw files (right out of the camera) and a sequence of all the footage exported and optimized for YouTube for no charge. I would like to tell you a little bit more about what we do over lunch sometime that way you could refer us to someone you think we may be a good fit for. Footage for a referral haha!

I would get a 2TB portable hard drive formatted for mac and preferably usb3 (at least firewire 800).

What do you say?

[chadwhitacre]

Awesome, Brandon, thanks! I've just pulled the trigger on one of these:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CO1I2DU/

Looks like it will be here in a week. Wanna schedule a lunch for Nov 1?

[chadwhitacre]

I've got an interview with Salon tomorrow (Twitter), and the author, Andrew Leonard, wrote up Watsi a month ago, which led me to this BBC video of Chase. Watching Chase on video convinced me that this is in fact the route I want to go: to only do videos where I can get the raw footage in the public domain, if I can. It's awesome that Brandon and Covalent are willing to work with me here. :-)

I'm basically using my $125 from Tech Alliance (#1607) to cover this. In the same way that that money is mine and not Gittip's, this project is really mine and not Gittip's, I think. My personal brand, and whatnot. I should probably publish videos and interviews and stories on whit537.org, and I should probably have that in a separate repo (that's under my personal GitHub account, not Gittip's) with it's own issue tracker.

This seems like a potentially great use of Amazon Glacier.

[patcon]

Here's a thought to minimize the overhead of sending big data to those interested: Perhaps set up a "store" somewhere where people can buy you a harddrive/usb stick, and set up different products for each set of raw videos. If people want the raw video, even though it's too big to host online, they just buy one of these storage devices, it comes to the address where the HD originals live (your address?), and you transfer all the files over and send it along. That would seem to make the raw video maximally accessible/transparent, while still keeping the burden low for whoever has to handle to originals. Plus we can compile a public record of all the people who have copies, for community backup should anything happen to the originals :)

I set up a demo wish-list. You just type in the size of the storage medium needed as an "idea", add comments to the idea with links to the smaller youtube videos and video metadata (location, date, topic, etc.), then people can see the public wish list and search for the best deal on a suitable harddrive. The pick the cheapest drive with enough space, and your address shows up as an option when they checkout:

http://www.amazon.ca/gp/registry/wishlist/1SLUPNKRJ9R6Q

Anyhow, maybe it's overengineered, but I've never used an amazon wishlist before and had this figured out in 5 minutes :)

[chadwhitacre]

@patcon That's not a bad idea. Since I need to buy hard drives to manage the data transfer in the first place, I might as well just leave it on the hard drive at my house and ship it at cost to interested parties.

[colindean]

Could you put them on archive.org?

[stoikerty]

Alternatively to the raw files, you can ask to have it in a proxy format such as GoPro's free Cineform Codec. The files are smaller, yet retain a very high quality. It's also faster to edit than uncompressed video. I strongly suggest 1080p over the troublesome 1080i.

As for storage... I have about an hour of 1080p/50fps footage in that codec at 90% quality, it's less than 80Gb. Not sure how much space you'll need and for how long, but next to S3 the cheapest cloud-storage option is Skydrive's 200gb for 100$. Better still is a server near to you to drop the files off.

archive.org seems like an interesting idea, do they have upload limits?

[chadwhitacre]

I've just uploaded the code for whit537.org to GitHub, and I've reticket this as https://github.com/whit537/whit537.org/issues/1.

[pluma]

If you want to store and distribute (to the community) large raw media files, maybe you should consider a peer-to-peer protocol like BitTorrent Sync. The advantage over a pure archival service like glacier would be the immediate availability. The downside is that you'd still be transferring (potentially) terrabytes worth of data initially.