Need help on zipping files on a Mac

[Heath McKnight]

Hey everyone,

I need to zip some files on a Mac, but other than the zip program in Mac OS X (called archive, and it didn't compress it more than 0.3MB), are there any free zip programs available?

Also, I have to get a 23MB WMV file down to around 10 or so. I'll try compressing the movie again in Final Cut Pro to get it smaller, but quality will suffer.

Heath

[Shaun Roemich]

Heath, remember that ZIP-ping files is intended to be completely lossless and only removes redundancies (and a bunch more stuff I don't understand) so I can't imagine compressed video is going to get much smaller, just like JPEG's generally don't benefit much, in my experience. I think you're stuck with recompressing.

The 10MB limit I assume is for an e-mail inbox limit. Can you use a web service like You-Send-It instead?

[Heath McKnight]

We tried StuffIt Deluxe and had success with QuickTime movies, but WMVs saw very little compression.

The client wants to be able to email it. Maybe I should go into DVD and Web Video Delivery and get some WMV settings in Final Cut Pro. They may not be able to email a 9.5 minute video without it looking bad and being as small as a postage stamp, aspect ratio-wise. And we don't want to send that out!

Heath

[Shaun Roemich]

Have you tried MPEG-4/h.264 files? I've had reasonable success at about 1MB/minute.

[Andrew Stone]

I assume Heath that FTPing the files into a website directory and have them download is not an option. Something else you could try is to setup up Gmail accounts and email them via Gmail that won't restrict you on a file size limit.

[Heath McKnight]

The client is a major hospital, so no GMAIL. We mentioned YouTube to them, but they have firewalls that keep employees from going on.

heath

[Heath McKnight]

Originally Posted by Shaun Roemich

Have you tried MPEG-4/h.264 files? I've had reasonable success at about 1MB/minute.

What are your settings? Do you create it in QuickTime Conversion or Compressor?

Thanks,

heath

[Shaun Roemich]

I bought Sorenson Squeeze for exactly this sort of thing. I'll try and track down my settings.

[Andrew Stone]

Heath, does the hospital not have an IT dept or staff people?

Assuming you are familiar with FTP and their IT staff are not hostile or anal, I would suggest they launch an FTP server without anonymous login priveledges and map the FTP server to an odd port (FTP is assigned to port 21 by default), have them setup a user account for you and dump the files onto the FTP server at the hospital. However, the following route is probably a much easier thing to do. And that is to have the files posted in a web directory on a website that you have or a colleague/friend of yours has; send the client the links from the webpage with the files to download. The later approach is how I have dealt with my clients in the variety of design and production work I have done since '94 when people first had relatively easy access to FTP clients. It's been over a decade since I have had a client that couldn't cope with downloading a file from a webpage.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Originally Posted by Andy Stone

I would suggest they launch an FTP server without anonymous login priveledges

You might consider SFTP instead - Secure FTP. With regular FTP your password is sent as clear text I believe. Around here the IT staff did not want to continue supporting regular FTP but is OK with SFTP. There are free, user-friendly clients available - WinSCP for Windows and Fugu on the Mac.

[Andrew Stone]

Hi Boyd, I would/should have suggested secure ftp, however, I wasn't sure of Heath's knowledge of FTPing so I wanted to keep things relatively straight forward until he qualified matters.

Personally I use SCP (Secure Copy) via a UNIX commandline when I am transferring files between most servers I use right now but I know few people that go beyond email, let alone FTP except for sysadmins and high order geeks.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Well count me as a part of that minority too :) If you like that approach, on the Mac you can open a terminal window and use sftp to your hearts content... all of the BSD stuff is part of MacOSX.

% man sftp
SFTP(1) BSD General Commands Manual SFTP(1)

NAME
sftp -- secure file transfer program

SYNOPSIS
sftp [-1Cv] [-B buffer_size] [-b batchfile] [-F ssh_config]
[-o ssh_option] [-P sftp_server_path] [-R num_requests] [-S program]
[-s subsystem | sftp_server] host
sftp [[user@]host[:file [file]]]
sftp [[user@]host[:dir[/]]]
sftp -b batchfile [user@]host

DESCRIPTION
sftp is an interactive file transfer program, similar to ftp(1), which
performs all operations over an encrypted ssh(1) transport. It may also
use many features of ssh, such as public key authentication and compres-
sion. sftp connects and logs into the specified host, then enters an
interactive command mode.