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Natural Victims: Watch it Now!

Natural Victims is now online! It's free to watch, but if you like it, you're obligated to tell everyone you know.

Go, watch, and then return here if you'd like to read about all the drama that happened in trying to get a copy up online.

The Saga of the Upload

Micah and I pulled an all-nighter and had the edit very close by 9am Friday morning, when I had to start doing work for my job, the one that pays for experimental filmmaking like this. Because we were editing at my work, and because they are cool, Micah continued to have his own bay and I was able to keep checking in with him. We finished at 11am and I started a full rez export of the movie.

That took only about an hour. Then I started the movie encoding to H264 in Quicktime Pro, using settings based on Blip.tv's recommended settings.

That took eight hours! What began as a 65GB file was now 600MB.

Then I set the file uploading to Blip.tv and went to dinner. When I came back, I saw it had uploaded successfully and was in the process of converting to flv.

Unfortunately, the estimated time to convert was more than 7 hrs. I had gotten a Pro Account with Blip because then they let you convert a file that takes longer than an hour. Unfortunately, they cut off Pro account conversions after 6 hrs.

I was able to get a Quicktime streaming version up through Blip.tv - I'm guessing this is my original .mov file. It doesn't use their nice player, and it seems like the file has playback issues in IE7 and some versions of Firefox & Safari. Very annoying, and I'm definitely losing views when people go there and find they can't play it.

I'm splitting up the 1 hr, 5 minute sequence up into under-10 minute chunks for YouTube and will try to make a playlist version of it there that will play through the whole thing. In meantime -- you can watch Natural Victims right now!

And hopefully by the time your friends that you've told to watch it come by, there will be a more reliable, full-screen HD version to watch.

About J. Ott

John Ott is a writer, filmmaker and futurist. Follow him on Twitter or Like him on Facebook.