fannish complaining

[sholio]

... is it just me, or are fanvids suffering from a case of megabyte-bloat lately? I get that you want your vid to be high-quality, but past a certain point, I'm not going to bother downloading it. I clicked on one link the other day, only to discover that the vid was 420 Mb. For three and a half minutes of video? I don't think so!

(I also do not support this growing trend to offer vid links without telling me what format I'm downloading or how big it is. Mystery vid surprise! Do not want!)

When I make vids, I've had a lot of trouble finding a compressor that'll give me a reasonably sized video that isn't choppy or poor quality. So I do understand that it can be a struggle with the technology, especially for a newbie vidder. But ... do people not even check? Or am I just behind the times, still thinking in terms of "bandwidth" and "hard drive space"?

ETA: So that this post isn't just whine, I have discovered yes, Virginia, there will be an SGA Big Bang this year!

And purimgifts is open for signups. Should I? Should I not? *dithers*

ETA 2: sg1_beyond_otp is taking prompts for their Gateverse OT3+ ficathon. You don't have to participate to leave prompts!

Comments

[sholio]

THANK YOU. *clings* I keep seeing bigger and bigger vids -- I remember when I thought 75-80 Mb was huge! Now it's kind of average! I like to keep vids around (even if it wasn't a particularly awesome vid, sometimes I'll get back into a fandom years later and it's really nice to have everything in a folder long after the download links have expired), but the bigger they are, the more bloated my vid-folders get, and the more I want to clean them out regularly.

[trobadora]

I suspect that you're right and a lot of people just don't think size is an issue any more. (*snort*) It's the same kind of thinking that leads to Word documents being ridiculously bloated these days because no one bothered to strip all the extraneous crap. There's no reason it should be that large. - And if a vid is larger than a whole ep it gets just a bit over the top. *g*

[sholio]

Or programs that take up ridiculous amounts of space and take nearly as long to perform simple tasks as their older versions used to take on my painfully slow Powermac, 15 years ago? I cannot imagine how fast Photoshop 3 would run on modern hardware. Probably faster than CS2 does now ...

At the job I left last year, running a graphic design department, I used to constantly be after my employees to clean up the server and not clutter it up with giant files until nothing would fit anymore. I was trained on hardware that was so cramped for space that we had to watch every megabyte (hell, every kilobyte) very closely. KIDS THESE DAYS. *shakes cane*

[trobadora]

OMG YES. I still have the entire hard drive of an older computer of mine, backed up from when the stupid thing crashed. The entire thing fit on one CD, operating system and all - and that wasn't even that long ago.

And I remember saving fanfic at uni and carrying it home on floppy disks, back when I didn't have internet at home - hell, you bet every kilobyte counted there!