Part 8 of 8: Opening Day
Early in the morning on June 5th, 405 was finally converted to an AVI file and put on the internet for all to see. The film was edited using Adobe Premiere using full, video resolution Targa sequences for each shot. The movie was then rendered down to a 320 X 240 uncompressed AVI file with uncompressed 44 kHz stereo audio. It was from this huge file that the actual downloadable files were created. After trying to get an acceptable compression and quality out of Quicktime (probably due to our unfamiliarity with the finer aspects of Quicktime compression) it was decided to go with the DivX MPEG-4 codec . To do the actual compressoin a program called Virtual Dub was used. Inside Virtual Dub you can try different settings and compression methods very quickly to see how small you can get your file. It is really an indespensible utility for compressing movies and it is free.

The file was then FTP'd to our server and the links were activated. That day, Bruce and Jeremy e-mailed about 50 people (Mostly friends, people in visual effects industry, and family) to spread word of the movie's completion. In the days that followed the traffic to the web site grew quickly. On the second day Ifilm contacted the filmmakers and the film was converted into its streaming format on Ifilm.