QuickTime Download - Prepare for Internet "Fast Start"

This is the second (if not third) time I've had trouble with getting QuickTime movies to "fast start" on download (and it pains me to say because I love QuickTime ;o) -- but I need to post something here, so I'll remember next time what I need to do to get it to work! Even though I save the movies in QuickTime pro, with the Fast Start flag toggled on, when I test downloading them, the Fast Start feature does not kick in; meaning that visitors get the big blue Q while waiting for the download, and unless they notice the "transferring" message in the status bar, they may think the download is not working.

I finally got it to work and am close to knowing why this is happening -- normally I compress the video and then use QuickTime Pro to enter the Movie info (copyright, description, keywords, etc) and use "save" -- it is possible that this is removing the Fast Start. The other possibility is that I really need to use "Fast Start - Compressed Header" via Compressor. The version that is working for me now, was created in Compressor with "Fast Start - Compressed Header" and I did not open it to re-save it in QuickTimePro with the additional Movie Info. I need to figure out how to add that via Compressor.

On to the DVD.

h264 rocks

Wow. Today I was preparing files to take to a sound engineer who has agreed to critique my sound mix. He recommended that I bring the film as a QuickTime H264 movie and the final mix on a data CD. When I first exported the H264 movie using the default settings, the file size was huge, so I reduced the bit rate in half, thinking there would be a reduction in quality. and being a bit apprehensive because of the amount of time it takes to export the movie. Well I was wrong about the quality and it was certainly worth the 2 hour export time. I now have a 1280x720 QuickTime H264 that weighs in at 265 mb, that looks beautiful (and the mix sounds pretty good too -- but that is really for my sound engineer to judge ;o).

I've also been preparing the documentation and promo stuff for festivals and looking at the various festivals in which to enter the film. It feels like an uphill battle because it will be rejected from most -- in fact this is the statistic -- most films only make it into 25% of festivals they are submitted to. Knowing that it was rejected 5 times from funding agencies isn't helping my motivation right now. Reading all the rules and figuring out the deadlines and whether I can afford the projection format requirement they want and the publicity materials ... ughh it's a bit overwhelming. I'm hoping that once I get a complete package done, it will only be a matter of duplicating it. Next up is to create media screeners and a poster.

Anyhow, I have lovely DVD covers and labels waiting to be affixed to the DVDs. Here is a postcard that I'm working on:









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Discovered that you can export to a QuickTime Movie from the Flipbook, so this makes it a bit easier to get from XSI into Premiere... I'm still looking for a quick and easy way to render ... for now I've cut the resolution in half (320 x 243) and have reduced the anti-aliasing to 0, turned off shadows. It still takes a bit of time to render out.

I've made good progress today, I've almost finished with the primary animation of the moose. I'd forgotten to model the tongue, so I went back and did that and added the phone while I was at it ... because the moose has to pick up the phone ! Its a cheap-o phone and took less than 10 minutes to model. Of course the moose doesn't have any ears to listen to the phone but I'm skipping that, its not like its a photo-realistic film or anything.

I had to fudge around with the constraints of the eye rigs to the head, 'cause by the time the moose died the eyes were no longer on the surface of the head .. fixed by messing around with the offsets in both tangency and normal pages of the object to cluster constraint property pages.