I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

FREE VIDEO UPLOADING? ANOTHER OPTION...

For a while now, I've been wanting to put my animated short debut from 2002 (and the only "completed" piece of animation I've ever done), "More than Meets the Eye", a Transformers homage, somewhere free and reliable on the Internet. But, even though it's only 30 seconds long and silent, because I didn't really use any sort of compression on the AVI file (and I don't want to compress it, because there's some fine detail in there I don't want to lose), the file size is about 31 mb.

My first attempt was with OurMedia.org, which is a completely free service that lets you upload files directly to the "Internet Wayback Machine" Web Archive servers. As I wrote before, I think that Ourmedia is a great place if I want somewhere I can dump a large image file to instead of nuking my Photobucket account. I recently did a post over at Ourmedia about a mysterious object I photographed at the 2002 Canadian Grand Prix that probably isn't a ghost, but I can't quite identify it, and I included, as an attachment, a uncompressed scan of a photo of racetrack firemen in a Chevrolet pickup truck that's some 400 kb in size, several times as big as the version of the photo I put in this entry in my poor, neglected Photoblog over at Fotopages.com. But, for uploading video files larger than about 10 mb, Ourmedia is fairly useless. They tell you to use their uploading program for larger files, which would be fine, except it doesn't work at all on my Windows ME computer, and I've heard that it doesn't work on many other computers either.

My second attempt was with the brand new Google Video Upload service, which is not only free to use, but, if you so choose, you can actually set a downloading fee if you want to make money from your videos. (I have no intention of charging. I only have the one AVI file anyway, and it's very amateurish. Don't expect The Incredibles. Expect the polar opposite, actually.) I got the Google Video uploader programme, and, wonders of wonders, it actually worked. I was able to upload the file to their server with minimal effort. The downside is that someone at Google has to screen the video first, just to make sure that it's nothing illegal and that I'm not infringing on anyone's intellectual property. (Actually, if they're super-strict about that one, they might not accept it as, while the animation itself is 100% my own, there is an actual 1980s TV commercial on a television screen that obviously I didn't make. A lot more than I would be able to get away with claiming as "fair use", but, since I'm not making any money off of it, I don't think there would be a problem.)

I don't have a problem with the fact that they're screening the videos, as, obviously, they'd be at least partially liable legally for what is hosted on their servers, but they are taking their damn sweet time at telling me whether or not they'll accept my video file. If they do accept it, I'll write a separate new post talking about the animation, since, rewatching it recently, I found a couple of small details I had never noticed before, and I created the damn thing!

posted by Steve Brandon @ 5:56 PM