Greetings.

I've just completed a short documentary and am now looking into submitting it to a few film festivals. I've got a WithOutAbox account, and my head is spinning with the quantity of film festivals. Working through that to find one appropriate for my film.

My question is for those of you who may have or use WOAB. I have been having trouble with the quality of the online screener that you can upload to IMDB. I've followed WOAB (vague) guidelines for upload specs but my film looks terrible, and I'm concerned that this could have a negative impact on someone that might be considering my submission.

I'm using Compressor (part of Final Cut studio) to get my 29 minute film to under the 2GB requirement. My upload size is about 360MB @ 854 x 480.

Should I not bother with the online screener and just send them a DVD/BlueRay copy instead?

I've contacted their "support", however every time you need to send a reply to one of their answers, you have to send an entirely new support form.!!!

I created an account and had uploaded the file from a DVD. My film is 18+ minutes and the 720p became 1GB. But there was some issue with the colours.

Sending a DVD/Blue ray is better as you will have better quality. I am struggling with the compression artifacts while converting to DVD. So 1080p would be great. You can also try the 1080p H.264 option and copy that to a DVD. That is the reason why I didn't use it for even a single submission.

Sabyasachi

Do a search, this topic has been covered here before.

I haven't used their online screeners, and wouldn't after reading this quote from a festival programmer on another forum:

"As a filmmaker I know that other filmmakers would throw a hissy fit if they saw the online viewer they force us to use. It has terrible compression, doesn't resize for the the variety of film ratios they accept, takes forever to buffer and then skips. If a filmmaker knew that I was trying to watch their film that was skipping and was squeezed into the wrong viewing box they would egg the HQ of withoutabox."

Should I not bother with the online screener and just send them a DVD/BlueRay copy instead?

I've contacted their "support", however every time you need to send a reply to one of their answers, you have to send an entirely new support form.!!!

Send DVDs or Blurays - that way you have complete control over the quality of your content. I've used Withoutabox, and as long as you follow their instructions correctly you should be okay. Their customer service sucks big time, but then one can overlook that fact because they are doing indie filmmakers a great service, IMO.

I'm not sure about this but most major festivals need physical screeners, right?