Best setting for a big screen projection?

Question

Hey,
I'm working on a project that is supposed to be screened on a big screen (I assume something like a small movie theater screen) and I was wondering - what would be the best settings when exporting for something like that? If I compressed it with h.264 but still kept it HD 1440x1080 would that be good enough for a big screen projection or would it be too compressed? I am working in Apple ProRes, the video is about 4 minutes long and when I export it with current settings - it comes out to be about 5.5GB (most of the footage I used was old archived videos though) and I'm trying to get it down to about 2GB so I can send it over the internet.
Anyone out there ever exported a movie for a movie theater before?

Answer 1

David Harbsmeier wrote:
a data dvd as well just to be safe
How do you know that the playback system will have the codec needed to play your file?
Anyone by any chance know of a free software that can split the 5.5GB across multiple data dvds?
Why not use a dual-layer DVD?
David's suggestion makes sense, but if you really want to know...
You can break up large files into smaller segments using the Terminal command "Split".
In the following example, we will break a short (imaginary) movie, "MyFilm.mov" into 5MB pieces, in this form it could be sent piece by piece via email, without blocking the recipients mailbox for everything else.
Place the file to be split onto the desktop (this keeps it simple, otherwise you will have to "cd" to the directory where your movie resides)
Open Terminal and...
TYPE: *cd desktop* and press return
TYPE: *split -b 5000k MyFilm.mov* and press return
This will produce a number of files on your desktop named xaa, xab, xac and so on. There is a way to retain the original name or rename the file to something else but I don't have documentation on this at hand.
The "5000k" part of the command is the size of the individual split files (in this case, the file will be broken into pieces of approx. 5MB each
Depending on the files total size you might want to break it into say, 50MB pieces - substitute "50m" for "5000k" in this case. This also saves you from having to type all those zeros!
These days, you are more likely have a movie several Gigabytes in size - as an example, the DV format uses 13GB of disk space for an hour of video. Prepare those files for burning to multiple CDs by typing "650m" after the split -b command.
This may take some time to process, depending on the size of the resulting files, how much RAM you have and the speed of your Mac.
At some point, your emailed or archived files will need to be re-assembled into a viewable movie. So....
Rejoin a set of split files:
Place all the files "xaa", "xab" etc, that are to be rejoined, onto the desktop
(keep it simple, remember...)
In Terminal;
TYPE: *cd desktop* and press return
Type *cat x* > MyFilm.mov* and press return. Again, this may take some time, depending on the size of the resulting files.