Any other ways to send large .avi files ?

@ Arcadian

re: YouTube vs Vimeo - I make animation video's using Cinema 4D, so maybe a comparison to home movies is not totally correct, however, when I have uploaded 1080p content to YouTube my stuff looks pretty dire due to to YT's compression. It's understandable that they lower the bitrate - their bandwidth bills must be astronomical. I recently took a £200/year Vimeo Pro deal and my movies on Vimeo look almost as good as the originals on my HDD. Sure they process the vids, but they recommend you upload at a higher bitrate than the streaming figure, to get the best results eg I upload @ 30Mbit, and the streams end up at about 5Mbit. YMMV re home movies.

Although YouTube might be good enough for your purposes (do a test), AFAIK YT have a 10 min limit (in comparison, one of my Vimeo vids is 1 hour - not poss on YT), but hey - it's free. The free Vimeo is a bit limited - 500MB/week, Plus is 5GB/week and Pro is 20GB/week. I think the prices on their site are before tax.

My stuff is mainly of interest to other animators eg tutorials, but you're welcome to have a peek
https://vimeo.com/user32158598

Whether you opt for video hosting or OneDrive/Dropbox etc, you've still got to upload 20GB+.

Arcadian said:

Do you know about the uploading times with YT ? Will it firstly take just as long ? And secondly wouldn't 20GB + need more than 10 minutes to play or is it all split up to suit first ?

Uploading time doesn't depends on what service you use, it's all about your connection speed. 20GB will take hours to send (no matter where) in the best case. Youtube/DropBox/Torrent/FTP/Whatever won't make upload faster as it depends only on your computer and connection, but different services may improve download speeds afterwards.

Don't worry too much about where to upload, as long as it meets your requirements for privacy and quality.

re: YouTube 10 mins - a quick Google tells me that default max is 15 mins, but you can 'verify' your account (needs a mobile phone) to have the limit removed, although if you've had copyright notices in the past, this may count against you. In fact, editing your footage into a set of 10-15 min clips might be the best way to organize things.

Arcadian said:

Thanks....

Looking at it all from another tangent are there any better and quicker alternatives than .avi given all these difficulties, as I'm thinking it might be easier in the long run to buy another camera and avoid using .avi altogether ?

Actually, I did wonder if your movie clips were a bit large due to avi (hence the 20GB). You could prob lower the file sizes by converting to mp4 at a lower bitrate (and poss smaller framesize) using Handbrake eg 1 hour at 1.5Mbit is about 700MB and still OK quality. You can set several clips to convert and leave it running overnight. If you reduced the 20GB somewhat, you could send the clips using, say, Dropbox. Dropbox is quite easy to use, and once the clips are uploaded you just email the link and the recipient downloads them. IIRC, if you use mp4, the clips can also be played straight from Dropbox. You get 2GB free with Dropbox, so you could send the clips 2GB at a time. You might also want to look at the free editor AviDemux - if you cut your mp4 clips on an I frame, there's no recoding.

https://handbrake.fr/
avidemux | SourceForge.net
https://www.dropbox.com/