My parent’s anniversary is coming up and I have asked several friends and family members around the country to record their congratulations and greetings in a short video using their smartphones, cameras, web-cams etc. and e-mail them to me.
My intention is to put all these together and burn them on a disc so that my parents can view them. Editing and burning them to the disc is no problem. I’ve done similar type things numerous times in the past.
But several people are complaining that they can’t send the files via e-mail because of size limitations. Now apparently most 10-15 year olds can video all sorts of things and send them to their friends, but I’m at a lack of understanding of how to simply explain this to a group of 30-60 year olds.
Anybody care to take a stab at generally explaining this for me to send on to my group?
As an email server administrator I would say PLEASE DON’T EMAIL VIDEO FILES!
Kids are no doubt posting their videos on any number of video hosting sites and sending their friends links.
My suggestion would be to get a short subscription to DropBox or Amazon Cloud Services or some other data storage place and give out the username and password and short instructions on how to upload clips.
I know this sounds silly, but have them give their phones to their kids/nephews/nieces/cousins etc and have them do it. The easiest way, if they’re bumping into size limitations is going to be to send it to facebook or youtube (this is where the kids, with accounts to those websites, come in), easier still if they can do it right from their phone instead of transferring to their computer first.
It may be that their email provider has limits. One way to get around this is to split a file into parts with a utility like HJSplit, then send each part in a separate email message.
Or you can use a place like yousendit.com, in which they upload their file, yousendit e-mails you a link, you download it, and Bob’s your uncle. It’s a free subscription and I use it all the time.
Thanks guys. I have opened a yousendit account and asked everybody that may be having file limitation issues to send me their videos via yousendit. That will allow them to send me a file up to 50MB for free.
Someone else already took it upon themselves to send me a link to their dropbox account so that I could retrieve their video that way.
