Friday, March 12, 2010
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Tuesday, March 09, 2010
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FilesDirect is all about moving big files around the net. Our users have an easy time putting big files right into the hands of the people who need them - customers, clients, or colleagues.
But sometimes, the same file can take a different length of time for one user to download than for another. Why is that?
The reason is not everybody has the same sized connection to the internet. Some homes and offices have DSL connections or even dial-up (although this is rare these days). Other offices have cable modem connections, which are themselves of differing speeds depending on how much money the company pays for the service. Beyond cable, some offices and campuses have fiber connections to the internet, which provides the fastest of all service - and the fastest download speeds.
The geographical location matters too. Some continents, such as Africa, have few fiber connections at all, relying mainly on DSL. Other places, such as Japan, have fiber to the home roughly as common as cable to the home is in most of the US.
That's why some file downloads take longer than others - even if the files are of the same size. The pipeline between one point and another can slow things up.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
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Let’s say you’re working on a video project. You’ve edited some video and you’ve parked it at an FTP server so that your client can download and view it. You need the client’s notes to proceed and time is of the essence. But the clock is ticking and the deadline is approaching while you wait for the client. A quick phone call to their office discovers the problem: the client’s assistant is having a hard time with the FTP download program. Sometimes it doesn’t connect to the server. When it does connect, he has to navigate to the right folder. And once he does that, he has to figure out how to move the file along to his boss.
Meanwhile, your costs just increased because your editors are on overtime while this drama plays out.
Headache! Delay! Expense!
Why ever mess with FTP when FilesDIRECT uses the power of email notifications along with the ease of linked downloads? Put your video and other large files directly into your client’s email boxes – no navigating, no playing with servers. No room for error. They click on a link and the file starts downloading. Cost-effective, easy to use and tailored for business – that’s FilesDIRECT.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
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Jenny's a Producer at a boutique advertising agency in St. Louis. The company is small but the clients aren't - major national retail and restaurant chains depend on her work for TV commercials and viral videos on the web. Without FilesDIRECT, her whole job would grind to a halt.
For one thing, the video files wouldn't get where they needed to go without FilesDIRECT.
"I use three video editors, one of whom sits across from me, but the other two are in Chicago and Minneapolis," says Jenny. "I can have five or six different projects cooking at any one time, so there's raw video footage flying all over the place. Files Direct is the easiest way to be sure that the editors get the footage they need to finish the clips."
What goes out must come back, so Jenny's editors ship back their cuts to the home base using FilesDIRECT the same way.
"Then our client needs to see the cuts, give notes and approve. They even will add graphics and send back, so their involvement is hands-on. The last thing I want to do is make things difficult for them with technical glitches. We just need the file transfers to work. Files Direct makes that happen - every time."
Monday, February 15, 2010
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The work you do creates big files. The work we do moves them to where you need them to go. But what do we know about these files? Why are they so big? What's in their name?
1. VOB: When you see the filename extension VOB, you're looking at a file that came from a DVD. They're commonly big, often 1GB. The format name stands for "Video Object", because VOBs contain the video part of a DVD. And as we know from watching DVDs, they usually have the highest quality of all digital video. More quality means more data, means larger file size.
2. ZIP: Named for the PKZIP file format developed in the 1980s, the ZIP file is an archiving and data compression format. When you see a ZIP file, you're usually seeing a collection of files that have been "zipped" into one large file. And they can get big. Photo collections commonly run in ZIP files.
3. MOV: This is another video file format, commonly of less visual quality than a VOB file. It's also called a "QuickTime" file, because it was created with Apple's video program QuickTime. MOV files can become very large depending on their purpose. If they're meant for high-quality playback, they can reach to nearly a GB (gigabyte) in size.
4. AVI: A Microsoft video file format, the name stands for Audio Video Interleave. Developed in the middle 1990s, the early standards for computer video used video and audio as separate parts, interleaving them together at playback. AVI was one of the earliest formats to combine both data types into one file. Generally of lower visual quality than MOV, a five-minute AVI will generally be smaller than a five-minute MOV.
5.WAV/AIFF: Audio files. WAV stands for Waveform Audio Format and AIFF for Audio Interchange File Format. These file types are much more similar to each other than is commonly found in the media file universe. They both encode audio in nearly the same way (the encoding technique is called PCM) and so tend to be of the same size for their running times. No top-end limit means these files can run to many hundreds of megabytes.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
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In this era of broadband net connections to home, office and street, the web user experience is generous. Because of this, we expect our videos to stream and our email attachments to make it through every time. In general, whatever we want to move, no matter how large, we expect it to get from point A to point B without trouble.
Sometimes that just doesn't happen. Why? The answer is usually bandwidth.
Between point A and point B is a whole lot of connectivity. The connectivity is measured in bandwidth. In the exact same way a pipe in your home is measured in diameter and length, bandwidth is measured in kilobits per second, or kbps.
Pipes that carry water have a maximum capacity and this can be anticipated and engineered for. A 1" diameter pipe can carry less water across time than a 2" diameter pipe and so on. The same rules apply to internet bandwidth.
Bandwidth costs money, so some servers or services have more / better bandwidth than others. For example, FilesDirect has more than enough to make sure large file transfers happen reliably. Each different website on the internet is a server and the speed at which you receive the content it serves to you is greatly affected by the amount of bandwidth the web server operator has bought, or "provisioned".
That's just the first pipe in the chain leading back to you, though. Between you and that server are many pipes. Some are huge and operate at nowhere near capacity. But some are overloaded, slowing your transfer down just like an overloaded drain pipe will work slowly.
What's more, the connectivity's total bandwidth is constantly changing, which is why a download attempt that fails one minute might succeed the next, or vice versa.
In charge of your user experience, but hidden: that's bandwidth.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
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If you've never tried to send a large video clip across the Internet via email attachment, let me save you the trouble -- don't bother. Email wasn't designed to haul around large multimedia objects like video and that weakness still shows even at this late date. The problems are:
The File Probably Won't Get There
Video files are big by nature, and with the proliferation of cameras on laptops more video clips than ever are being created. Sharing these clips is key to business in a lot of cases, just like it is for PDFs, photos (JPEGs and GIFs) word processing and spreadsheet documents and all kinds of data types. The problem is that video clips are larger (contain more data) by far than any of these kinds of files. When you send a file using email, the sending program doesn't check with the receiving program if the attached file is too large to make it over, and with video, most of the time it is too large! So what happens is the email is sent - and bounces back with "attachment too large". But sometimes, much worse than that, the second big problem with video email happens:
The Attached Video Didn't Get There And You Don't Know It
The way email works means that a message with a big video file attachment probably won't get where you're sending it, which is bad enough. What's worse is: you might not even know it didn't get there. When email fails, you get a bounce message, but maybe not right away, and maybe not at all. Plus, it's very common that the email makes it over but the attachment is prevented from coming over -- and you are never told! That's no way to conduct business.
The Solution: Files Direct
Because Files Direct doesn't rely on email, any video attachment up to 2GB will make it to its destination! Send along the file and an email confirmation to you and to the recipient appears immediately, taking the mystery and unreliability out of video file delivery across the Internet.
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
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Here is what one of our users is saying about there File Transfer and Storage experiences
and why they prefer to use Files DIRECT when sending and receiving large files.
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As a print and design firm our business information and security of our client's data is our top priority. With FileDirect we are confident that our client’s data is secure and managed by a staff of support professionals that focus on our needs and give us peace of mind while allowing us to focus on our business."
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In the past we have tried other offsite data storage services, but when we needed support all we got was answering machines, high bills and a support team that was less than knowledgeable about their services and our needs. We would recommend FileDirect’s services to our customers and are confident that they will treat them right.”
Mike Amaral
President
Oak Hill Printing And Copy Center
Thanks Mike! We always enjoy speaking to our users. In fact we provide phone support to all our users on every account!
Want more bang for your buck when sending large e-mail attachments or sending and receiving large files?
Do you courier some files across the country and want to save time and money?
Receive a huge discount on our 1000MB at the unbeatable value of $24.99
signup today and receive a 50% Discount on our 1000MB Plan! That's a $50 value for only $24.99 !
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
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Web-based file transferring has previously been limited by long URL codes. FilesDIRECT has upgraded our system by integrating with bit.ly to shorten lengthy links making them easier to read. Shorter file codes reduce further hassles because less link breakages occur. Also, the need to copy and paste long URLs is eliminated thereby making file transferring more convenient and user friendly. Smaller file codes can also be used with Twitter and Facebook, thereby ensuring clients are able to source all media marketing outlets for their file transfers.