BPM Uploading Tips

Hi BPMers,

As you're prepping up for the shooting of your music video over this weekend, I wanted to send out this quick note about uploading movies to the FilmmakingFrenzy.com website as well, just to make sure that any new members of the Filmmaking Frenzy community are 100% up on how that process works.

It's insanely important that you upload your movie properly, obviously, as the first round of judging and finalist films will be taking place online through user voting. If you haven't uploaded with us before, I recommend having someone on your team familiarize themselves with the process BEFORE Sunday afternoon, because we're not going to have any wiggle room for movies that are uploaded after the timeline.

If you've already successfully uploaded a video with us in the past, then you can feel free to ignore the rest of this email. The one suggestion we have for you that's different than the process for the REWIND KINDLY contest is that we're asking everyone to create their own Brightcove account instead of signing in through ours. That will let you know right away if there was a problem with the upload and then you can get in touch with us and we'll figure out a solution with you.

If this is your first Frenzy, welcome. Uploading your movie is super easy, and just as simple as uploading to YouTube, but people get confused, so here's a step-by-step.

1) EXPORTING YOUR MOVIE

When your movie is finished, the first thing you want to do is export it properly for Internet consumption. That means that you need to compress it down and don't want to try to upload a full-screen HD movie because
a) our server won't be in HD anyway and
b) even if it was, it would take forever for your movie to download onto a viewer's screen, and no one but your mother would have the patience to wait for it, so your mom would be the only person to ever watch your movie.

We can accept a wide variety of videos in Flash, WMV and Quicktime formats and have no problem accepting most encoding methods, so if you have a preferred method for generating web videos, feel free to stick with the tried and true. We've found that the best results come from videos that are deinterlaced, 320x240 in pixel size, 500 kbps bit rate, with a frame rate of 14.98 and a keyframe interval of 30. The audio bitrate should be set to 64 kbps. Higher quality is allowed, but as I said, that may result in decreased playback performance on slower computers. And our server will not accept any files larger than 100mb. For a video under five minutes, however, you shouldn't even be coming close to that large of a file.

Save your movie with a file name that reads "YourTeamName - YourMovieName". This will help us find it on the Brightcove server and make sure we link the movie properly to your team.

If you haven't exported a movie from your editing system for web distribution before, try that now with some old footage you've got. If you run into any problems or don't understand any of those suggested export settings, you'll want to have extra time to get in touch with us and have us clear up your issue for you. Don't forget! To be eligible for prizes, you must include the filmmakingfrenzy.com bumper tag at the end of your movie. You can download the AVI at http://www.filmmakingfrenzy.com/bumper.avi.

2) UPLOADING YOUR MOVIE

Now that you have a properly-encoded web-ready version of your movie, you're ready to upload it to our server. To begin that process, you'll need to access your team's page. Log in to your user profile on FilmmakingFrenzy.com, and you'll see your teams listed at the bottom of the page. Click on your team name and you'll be directed to your team's profile page. Above the image for your team, there'll be a gray square button that says "Edit Team." Click on that, and you'll be taken to a page where you can edit all of the information about your team, including adding an image and writing a description of who you guys are. If you haven't filled out that information already, you should, because soon people will be watching your movies and wanting to know more about you.

Near the bottom of that Edit Team page, you'll see the box for Frenzies, including a subheading under "Your Frenzies In Progress." On that page, you can click on "Upload Your Team's Film," and you'll be taken to the first page of the Upload process.

That page will offer you more directions on how this process works, but the important things to notice are that we use the Brightcove service to host our Filmmaking Frenzy videos, and so when you move away from this page you'll be taken to a page on our website where you can create a Brightcove account. If you already have a previously existing account, feel free to use that. If not, just follow the simple box asking for your email address and a password and you'll be signed up. Brightcove won't send you any spam, the service is 100% free, and you won't be asked for any other personal information. Creating your account just lets you be in direct communication with Brightcove, which will come in handy in the unlikely event of a problem with your upload.

After you input your email address, you'll be able to create a Screen Name for your Brightcove account and a brief bio, if you wish. That information is all 100% optional, however. Click on the Create Profile button, and you'll be taken to a long text box full of terms and conditions you have to agree to. This is the Internet, after all, and no one can let you do anything without presenting a lot of text you won't read and asking you to click an "I Agree" button. We've read this text, and it's perfectly safe to agree to it. You don't lose ownership of your video or anything silly like that. Push "Continue" and you'll be taken to the Upload Video section.

Click the "Browse" button to find your web-ready version of your movie on your hard drive. Make sure the file isn't open in the background, and that the movie is stored on a local or mounted drive (not on a network drive that you share with other computers).

Enter the same title you used to save your web-ready file (YourTeamName - YourMovieName), then enter a brief description of your movie (200 words or less). This description will be displayed below your movie on the list of available videos to view and also beneath the viewing window on your film's page. Make it as funny or as serious as you like, but keep in mind that viewers will probably be judging you and deciding whether to watch your movie or not by what you write there.

In the "Assign Tags" field, please provide your Filmmaking Frenzy team name. Again, this will help us make sure we properly assign your movie to your team.

Click on the "Upload" button, and watch your status bar fill up! Do not close your browser or navigate away from that page. After your movie is uploaded, click on the Continue button, and you're all set.

Your video will not be immediately linked to your team's page, but as long as you don't get an error email from Brightcove, you are 100% uploaded correctly. We'll be linking movies to pages manually after they're uploaded, so it might take us through Monday evening to link every movie. Voting will start once all the movies are up, though, and every film will have the same chance to become a finalist. Congratulations on making it this far, and go get some sleep.

If you're running into problems, send me an email at henri@originalalamo.com or text me at 512-297-7269, and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. Like I said, however, test this process out ahead of time, because we don't have a tech support call center in India and I'm just one guy. If there are 50 filmmakers all trying to talk to me at the same time, some of them are going to miss the deadline, and we won't be able to do anything about that.