Archive notice: This article was originally published on May 1, 2015. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
This means that all data recorded and produced during the production of the film is freely available to everyone. The issued license makes it possible – for private use as well as for academic training purposes – to copy, modify and share the material. Commercial use is excluded. The raw material offers great opportunities to try out editing, color grading or other post-production skills. “We packed everything necessary into the archive to be able to produce the film completely in your own version. Everything from the screenplay, film and audio recordings, as well as music, to background noises,” explains Benjamin Czycholl, Managing Director of Openpot Media eK.
Torrent Download
Since an entire feature film naturally generated a considerable amount of data, the team released it via torrent download. In order initially to obtain a reasonable number of so-called “seeders”, the film studio also offers to send a copy by post to anyone interested who sends an appropriate storage medium to the company.
“Unfortunately, we cannot simply offer the nearly 100 GB of material for download via our server, as this would cause excessive costs. Unfortunately, we were also unable to find an open-source provider that would have been willing to offer the volume of data – most open-source providers are also specialized in software, and our undertaking seems difficult to categorize there,” says Czycholl.
The team compressed the image material with losses, because distributing 1.6 TB of uncompressed image material seemed impossible to them. The 280,000 individual images were compressed to 52 GB. “This naturally means accepting losses in quality, but these should largely remain below the threshold of perception,” says Czycholl. In concrete terms this means: compressed to 36mb/s JPEG-2000 in 2K cinema resolution and 12-bit dynamic range per RGB channel.
Program for Your Own Film Version
In addition to the option of producing your own version from the material, the archive also contains a program that produces a finished version from the raw material. It largely achieves the look and edit of the original film. So anyone with some know-how and plenty of time can put together their own copy completely free for private us. “We do not expect any loss of revenue as a result. Quite the contrary, we assume that people participating in some way are more likely to increase attention and thus revenue for the film than reduce it,” is Benjamin Czycholl’s assessment of the situation.
Here you can find all further information about the data from “Air No. 3”.
The trailer for “Air No. 3”:
The complete film is available here and all information about Studio Openpot is available here.
In DP 05 : 2015, our focus will also examine the subject of open source and the most important tools from this field in detail.
