Alternative - you can put it on a CD or memory stick and get it to him next day ....

You can also sign up for $29.95 for a year subscription with myfamily.com. This can be setup instantly and you get 100 megs of disk space.

You may also wish to invest in a web hosting ISP. I use StartLogic.com (referred to me by John Cline of this forum) that provides 1 gig of hosting space and 40 gig/month transfer for $7.50/month. You can ftp your file and create a password per user. They have a control panel where you can create simple pages with templates without knowing html. You can also use their web-based ftp application to browse and post your files.

I host several sites there (videobackstage.com and chanimal.com (all on the same site).

This will take about 3 days to setup a name and for it to work with your URL (but you can always use the temporary URL to transfer the file).

Also, 70 meg for 12 minutes sounds large. You should be able to cut it down to about 30 meg at 400 kbps,360x240, double encode (using Windows Media Encoder and steaming media server). This should be small enough to stream (or he can download), yet quality enough for proofs. The final can be sent via CDROM next day.

We just simply stream ours. Pretty fast to encode a 1meg stream, and the clients are usually interested in just seeing edits, titles, flow. They trust us for color correction, etc.
Very few of our clients are nearby, most are in midwest or southwest. They can all do broadband streams and in the rare occasion they can't, as Kelly suggests, we just send a CD of the same stream overnight. Worth the 14.00 FedEx charge. heck, even an hour for upload on your end and download on his end, plus bandwidth, more or less makes FedEx a better deal, IMO, if you're dealing with MPEG or DV files.

I haven't tried this site, but they claim up to 1gig storage for 1 week. Free.

http://s9.yousendit.com/

Thanks to everyone for their great advice. I've never done streaming before but I think it's nothing more than FTPing my render to a site and letting the client launch it from there.

Ted, I think I will look into your suggestion. I assume this means I'm going to have to purchase a domain name? Not sure what you mean about double encoding. I did cut down to animation size (320x240), is that the same as 400 kbps? Also encoded using Windows Media V9 but what is the double encoding (streaming media server) you mentioned?

Thanks again,

TomG

You should be able to run a FTP server over ANY internet connection as far as I know. We use Bullet Proof FTP and works a treat. Client can download using IE, so long as they turn off, ah damn forgot, anyway it's buried in the BPFTP help files.

Trick is to config the FTP port to an odd number, that way nothin knows you're running a FTP session! If you have a router / firewall then you need to open the port. Maybe this all sounds a bit daunting but if I can get it to fly without having to read the manual anyone can.

I usually just encode to WM9 or QT for the Macolites, for 12 mins of video you should be able to get a file that gives the client a reasonable look at the product during initial stages, for final appro send a CD/ DVD.

Bob.

Spymac.com (a Mac community but platform agnostic) offers a free 1GB account. This is where direct people to send large files when required.

Bob, well, yes you can physically run an FTP server on almost any connection. The point i was trying to make is that Time Warner doesn't want you to run one on a residential connection and they can and will disconnect you if they find one running, no matter what port it is. If they notice a huge amount of bandwidth usage they'll scan your connection and if they find a port answering FTP requests (or HTTP, SMTP, POP, etc.) they'll cut you off. They don't mind you doing it over a commercial connection though, which is what i use to host my server at home.

If you do need to serve up a lot of files then paying the extra $25/month for a commercial connection is probably worth it.

Registering your name is easy. Find a domain name register and pick a name. Domain names are sold wholesale for $5.00. Others retail them from $6.95 all the way to $35 (requiring two years registration = $70).

A registered name is a commodity and is the same. The only difference would be if you want additional services. The two I care most about are e-mail forwarding and doman name cloaking. Cloaking allows you to register different names and have them point to one you already own (but the URL will say the site name). For example, look at:

www.videobackstage.com and www.coolpianoteacher.com

These are both hosted on my www.chanimal.com site (in separate folders/directories). If you click on a link within either of the two "cloaked" sites you will see www.chanimal.com/coolpianoteacher/... otherwise you can't tell "much" (it always says www.coolpianoteacher.com without sub directories however).

Your ISP may also allow you to park multiple domain names without having to cloak (I think StartLogic allows two, but I cloak so I don't care).

Following are two places I use to purchase names cheap:

http://www.dnbuy.com/ for $8.97 (provides auto forwarding with domain cloaking)
http://www.hostway.com/personal/index.html for $6.95 (only provides forwarding - so I use it to "grab domain names" (see http://www.chanimal.com/html/about_us.html )since it is cheap)

The next step is to find an ISP. I am currently using startlogic.com (their $7.95/mo package for 1 GIG storage and 40 GIG/mo transfer, plus lots of free services).

You can use their free html package and build your simple "transfer" site easily, or you can code by hand or use an authoring package (I've used Netobjects Fusion for 8 years).

This may be the best long-term approach (cheaper than the $25/month upgrade to host your own, if you have such low volume (unlike Kelly with Chienworks who hosts all our videos on his server).

Hope that helps.

Ted

Thanks reidc for the lead. I went to spymac.com and tried to sign up for a free account but they sure asked for a lot of personal info (education, income, etc) and after a while I began thinking about their .... (SPYmac)....

Guess I could have lied about everything but decided not to and didn't join up.

TomG

I've used the http://s9.yousendit.com/ service before, works very well!

Jsnck, the yousendit site looks pretty interesting. But I wonder where they get a source of revenue? There's got to be a catch somewhere....

TomG

I cannot comment on what US ISP policies are obviously but down here most ISPs don't seem to care. Our domestic cable connection allows 10GB/month of traffic.
Now they do say they don't want you running web servers or FTP however they've yet to pull the pin on anyone for doing it. Reasons are two fold. Firstly the uplink speed is only 64K versus 5 MB downlink so you'd hardky stress anything running an FTP site anyway. Second thing is they say this in their policy to make it clear they don't provide a business grade service, in fact they will NOT provide one over cable simply for reliability / liability reasons. However they'll go out of their way to provide a "domestic" connection to a small business, I've had comments like "Isn't that a bed out the back?, someone MUST live here"!
Either way I would have thought a much simpler solution to Tom's problem would be to encode to WM9 so the file was small enough to email.

Bob.

Thanks, Bob...

I've got the .wmv file down to 22MB but it still is pretty large to email. Lot's of people can't handle that large of an attachment. Time Warner charges $0.99 per MB per month for storage over the 5MB that comes with the subscription to their RoadRunner service... that doesn't sound very cost effective to me.

I'm really not looking for a business grade service and, in fact, this is really the first time I ever really needed to do something like this. I still like the idea that Ted threw out....

TomG