Internet/web delivery of DCPs

[carl]

Hi all,

Has anybody used a good online service for sending a large DCP to somebody? Anything you'd recommend?

Thanks!
Carl

[Carsten]

I guess it depends a bit on upstream/downstream bandwidth on both sides. If they are very asymmetric, a cloud service and dedicated client software- e.g. Google drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox will be useful, as it's easier and safer with them to upload or download through a slow connection.Also depends on wether sender and/or receiver have subscribed to a commercial license with the necessary capacity.
I recently transferred a huge full length DCP to a colleague using Resilio Sync. It's a cloudless service that establishes a point-to-point connection and used our upstream to the max. It does not use intermediate cloud storage for the transfer, so, it is also the fastest possible solution.

I used to download large Bollywood DCPs from a Google drive account, however, since I didn't want to subscribe to a 1TB model at the tine, used the direct browser download option. Which worked for those rare cases, but was a bit cumbersome - I had to manually select every single DCP file (a pain for those huge Bollywood 2-part multi-reel DCPs). Every service has it's own specific pitfalls. When using a folder download through a browser with Google drive, Google would ZIP compress the folder content, and that never came to an end with a large DCP. UnZIPing 100+ GBytes then usually is not a fun thing as well, depending on the receiver system and disc capacities (temp files may fill up your boot disc).

For small DCPs, I use Wetransfer, or Dropbox, or Google drive. Many of those services are not nearly maxing out the line bandwidth of fast ISPs during up- or download. That's why I prefer Resilio now for large transfers.

I also received a few DCPs through Filemail, also using their windows client. That's cloud-storage based, but it's sufficient if one side pays for a larger capacity account, whereas with using DropBox, Google drive or OneDrive client software, both sides need to subscribe for the necessary capacity.

I never had reliability issues, e.g. broken files, but I am a careful person and use wired connections, leave the machines alone during transfers, disable standby functions, etc.

[mdudzik]

Glad you asked!

I second Carsten on Filemail - I am using if since 2017 and it's getting better and better. Unfortunately, also a bit more expensive, but it's still one of few (if not only one) affordable solution with UDP acceleration of transfers (similar to FASP protocol used by Aspera) -- it's important on high latency connections, with long physical distances (e.g. from Europe to Australia) to keep transfers fast, without TCP/IP bottleneck. With its client (unfortunately no native Linux version) it's possible to transfer whole directories without zipping it first

I find (S)FTP working good as well, but it requires a little bit of knowledge on how to use it from both sender and recipient side - these days there's plenty of people who does not know how to use Total Commander or FileZilla

Re. Dropbox/Google Drive - in my opinion it's not really good way to go, as the downloads break often while using web browser (one may try external download managers, but it's another app you have to install and configure). You can also sync it via Dropbox or Google Drive app, but in this case the recipient has to use paid account as well, because free have too small storage space (at least for features).

[carl]

Thanks both!

[igit]

Hi,
I use many metods for internet delivery
1. Torrent - isa simple, fast and helps to take the burden off you when someone has already downloaded and he will also distribute
2. FTP - not so difficult copy\past full path to Filezilla, even our grandmothers can handle it
3. Resilio Sync
4. Data Expedition - like a ftp but more reliable and faster, but very expensive.