Let's see ... currently vegasusers.com has about 230 video clips uploaded at an average of 7.5MB each. There are an average of about 175 views per day. This is 1.7GB of storage and 1.3GB/day of data transfer. Storage isn't a problem, but my connection can only handle about 4GB/day maximum, so i've got some bandwidth left, but 30% is considered a pretty heavy load. Back when i was working for a commercial ISP we'd freak if the load hit 5% on our T-1 line. The only reason the files and transfer are this low is because most of the files are compressed to 256Kbps. DV files at 7.5MB would be only 2 seconds long. A 10 second DV clip would be 37.5MB. Adding even a few of these to vegasusers.com would trash the connection. It's just not practical. Maybe a few years from now when everyone has 100Mbps fibre running into their homes it would work, but by then i'm sure DV will be considered the poor man's compression and HD files at several GB/minute will be the norm.

Chienworks, thank you for your polite and informative reply.

Grazie

There is another way.
Sofo can create a bunch of "demo" clips and stills that we all share (on CD and/or downloadable).
Then we can transfer .veg files without the whole data.
For most questions and trials it might work.

I've been thinking about this some more. For many tests and questions, a 3Mbps WMV file would probably suffice. At 10 seconds these files are less than 4MB. Perhaps we could come up with a list of particular sample clips that would be useful, such as: close up face on plain background, person running, backlit portrait, wedding group interior lighting, subject on still complex background, subject on moving background, ... etc. and have people submit 5 to 10 second samples that fit these descriptions. I'd be able to make these available at vegasusers.com in a catalog. One could then submit a .veg file for others to experiment with and say that this .veg file requires clips 002, 015, 047, and 103 from the catalog. Others could download these clips as needed, hopefully storing them locally to avoid repeating downloads. If the project calls for it the clips could be rerendered to DV, but in most cases leaving it as WMV should suffice.

Projects that require a specific clip supplied by the project's creator could be uploaded as 3Mbps WMV for a limited time period, say one month or so. If it seems like a good candidate for the catalog and enough people vote for it during the month, it could be made a permanent entry. Otherwise it would be deleted. Likewise, any clips that aren't used for a very long period of time could be purged to make room for new ones.

Would this be helpful?

Yup! That'll do me. Good idea Kelly. I could then download - play with it. Add some stuff - make mistakes re-post; veg too; ideas and comments on the results. THIS would be a real Test-Bench. Purge and then get on with the next thing.

Maybe a catalogue of :

Idea: Format: Concept: Issue: Resolution:

I dunno - waddya fink?

Kelly, this needs a bit more thinking and scoping through. Let's keep this going - maybe a post over at the COW will "lassoo" some stray heffers! Yup?

I think we're definately onto something - yeah?

Grazie

Again, guys, both are BRILLIANT concepts, and beneficial for most everyone. It's that it's people outside of SOFO wanting to allocate SOFO's resources. We've had media like this available at our Sundance site for nearly a year. It's an issue though to constantly manage the uploads as it is. SOFO, I'm sure, doesn't have a person to manage yet another aspect of their site. Maybe code could be written to not accept files of over 1 meg, and to delete all files after 30 days. This is why we no longer accept streams ON our site, but will link to as many sites as we can. Chienworks has a terrific site for viewing this media as well.

Well, i'd be putting this on my own server, so it won't be eating up SonicFoundry's resources at all. The scripts i've written can already be set to reject oversized uploads. Since storage isn't a problem at all, i'd probably go for at least 90 days though, possibly much longer. Lots of people like to tinker and mull over ideas for long periods of time. This definately sounds doable.

Kelly! Brillllliiant! If it would be up and running Sunday 6th April our London Trio might make use of it.

Thank you very much . . . Will it have a veg deposit option so we could put up "problem" veggies? WIll it handle graphics so we can share what we are trying to tell each other?

My very bestest regards,

Grazie

Sounds like a good idea. Another suggestion... A simple site search engine would be very useful. I've used them on my other sites frequently in the past. Fairly simple Perl scripting you can write yourself (if you're into programming) or many canned versions on the web for chump change ($50 on less) very similar to what SoFo has.
I can't use mine now, WideOpenWest doesn't allow any CGI at this time. :-(

Grazie, April 6th? doubtful, sorry. This weekend's project list is already a mile long. Next weekend is much more reasonable. But yes, it will allow uploads of veggies, stills, even sound clips and such too. Probably the maximum file size will be 5MB, maybe less for the non-video files.

Billyboy, search is no problem. I've already got the scripts written for some of my other sites, most notably TOASTEDspam.com which has many thousands of entries. I've been meaning to add search to the video sharing site for a while now. I'll try to get the whole site revamped over the next week to include all this stuff.