SAKI Screener IMDB.com and Withoutabox.com

After many attempts trying to get a full length screener for SAKI up on IMDB.com (Withoutabox.com) for festival consideration I finally figured out the right settings. I don't know if it ultimately is the best way to do a screener (over sending a physical DVD) but hopefully all that work will benefit SAKI's chances to get into festivals. Here are some notes on the best settings so that I can remember details if I ever have to do this again - it took 4, pain in my ass, days to get it right:

- Original file was from a Quicktime ProRes1080 24p file with subtitles. Copyright watermarks were overlayed onto the picture. Bars and slate were cut out and outputted to a Quicktime ref file.

- After many failed attempts to export a movie file with Toast11 that is under the IMDB.com maximum file limit of 2GB, I imported the full res file into iTunes and then under "Advance" chose to convert to an iPod movie which created a 640 x 360 24p 1.6MBs file, about 1.6GB in size. Converting to iPad or Apple TV creates a 3GB file which is too big to upload.

- Using Safari and Chrome usually ended up in failure (although I successfully used Chrome to upload the SAKI trailers), so I used Firefox which initially failed until I uploaded the iTunes created file.

- Even though the video was uploaded and processed successfully, it still would not stream properly until the next morning.

Saki the Killer (Video 2011)

www.imdb.com

Directed by Chisako Yokoyama. With Chad Bates, Sergio Candido, Cathy Deobler, Aja Devaragas. Daughter to a slain Yakuza boss, Saki delves deep into her subconscious as an artist to find the darkness of her killer instincts.