Selling downloads of your film on your own part 9

So I've been doing encoding tests for the film recently... I took a 30 second sequence from the film using the "online" version which is a quicktime movie using the Sheer 10 bit rgb codec to make sure I'm encoding the highest quality source I can...

I purposely took shots from the film that I know will be the most difficult to encode without it looking like crap... its the foggiest, dustiest shots and that stuff just LOVES TO CAUSE BANDING Ughhhh.... banding?!?!?! (projectile vomits in terror) Blocking sucks too but it doesn't make me shudder in horror like banding... then banding + blocking AHHHH!

SO I am able to create a decent quality 1080p file and keep it at 3.9gb.... 4gb is the file size limit I'm working with for those who have tuned in late ^ ^ BUT its just "decent" and I assume that when people want a 1080p version "decent" isn't good enough so scrap that! So it looks like the 1080p version will be a 6gb movie file that I will break into 2 files via .zip file... so you'll download two 3 gb zip files, unzip em and it'll TRANSFORM into one 6gb movie file...

The problem with a movie file over 4gb is that it won't play on a Ps3, Xbox360 and windows xp will not be able to open a zip file over 4gb in size... so there's a lot of limitations... makes me wonder if its even worth doing? What do you think?

I was going to have the 720p version since its the most compatible be the featured version for sale... then if you dig deeper on the site...perhaps on the "more" page you'll find the 1080p and I'll just list all the limitations so people know before they buy it...

As for the 720p version....again I can keep the quality decent with a 2.5gb file BUT it looks much nicer with a 3.5gb file... I'm using all the tricks I know how to implement with the x264 codec... the tips I got from the guy over at doom10.org have really helped... so this file will play on everything making it the go to version...

So when encoding HSM there's going to be no magic formula to keep the file sizes really small due to all the dust, fog and grain in the film... I made it look dirty on purpose so yeh would be impossible to totally clean up without re-compositing the entire film... I mean the master looks tite... no banding or blocking whatsoever but thats because its a 10 bit video file...

I also built the mockup for the site where I'll sell the film...I haven't updated the site yet but I'll sell the film on youwilldieinside.com it will be a barebones site like the Louisck site... just a little info and the buy button... I've always had a problem with keeping things simple and it worked great for that guy ^ ^

For the people that want more there will be heartstringmarionette.com which will be the official film site with info + forum + all that

So yeh lots to do!


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