Federico Pistono

NIN releases 400GB of free HD concert footage via torrents

Posted 9th January, 2009 in

by Federico Pistono

Trent Reznor never ceases to amaze me. Today he posted on the new NIN website:

1.7.09: your gift!
The internet is full of surprises these days.
I was contacted by a mysterious, shadowy group of subversives who SOMEHOW managed to film a substantial amount (over 400 GB!) of raw, unedited HD footage from three separate complete shows of our Lights in the Sky tour. Security must have been lacking at these shows because the quality of the footage is excellent.

If any of you could find a LINK to that footage I'll bet some enterprising fans could assemble something pretty cool.

Oh yeah, you didn't hear this from me.

posted by trent reznor

A few minutes later Rob Sheridan in person adds:

There is about 405gb of HD footage available. It was recorded with multiple consumer HDV cameras during three shows: Victoria 12.05.08, Portland 12.07.08, and Sacramento 12.12.08.

This is raw, unedited, un-color-corrected HD footage. It will be primarily of interest to advanced users, who may wish to attempt to edit it together into something. It could be really interesting to see what creative users can put together using this and other fan-recorded footage. These guys are off to a great start already.

Novice users might not want to download this just yet. If you don't have a fast computer for playing back high definition video, or hundreds of gigabytes of storage available to save it to, this download will probably cause you nothing but problems. If you just want to see some live footage, you might be better off waiting until more advanced users get the footage and turn it into something more digestible for the masses. I'm sure a lot of this stuff will be turning up on YouTube as soon as people get it downloaded.

The footage is available as a free download via bitTorrent. If you don't know what bitTorrent is, please go to this link and read every word of it before you ask anyone on the forums what to do with the torrent files.

As the files are tremendously large, don't expect any instant gratification - the download may take days, even weeks. There are a handful of seeders to start things off. Until we get a large number of seeders, please only download these files right now if you intend to help seed them for a while after you're done. Certain downloaders will get much faster download rates than others, depending on your IP address. This is due to peering relationships our hosting provider has which we're utilizing to get some initial seeds out as fast as possible. If your download is going incredibly slow or not going at all, don't worry, it'll pick up within the next couple days.

Here are the links:

Victoria
Portland
Sacramento

The included README files have some further notes about the footage, which has been conveniently formatted for easy editing and even includes Final Cut Pro sequences with the footage pre-organized for editing.

The discussion at the NIN forum is very intense, at the moment there are more than 24 pages of replies, and every time I come back there are a few posts. Some have questioned the authenticity of the work. In fact, it looks too good to be real. But, as it turns out, this is actually happening.

NIN has nothing to do with us. First of all, due to Hippygeek's ostentatious website design skills, he was able to create a code that would automatically log everyone's email from your nin.com profile or ETS profile. It's a simple code (or maybe no so simple) that allows one to find and log information needed for the site to run.

Next - yeah. We might have already had everything ready to go when the stuff was put out, but we might have heard a rumor that something was going to happen. Might have. It wasn't officially from NIN, so don't get your panties in a twist.

Also - the footage that is for download on the nin.com page is NOT from fans. These mysterious shadows were professionals that just happened to be there. WINK WINK WINK *how many fucking winks do I have to insert in here to let you know that they were hired?*

Definitely not a marketing ploy. This is real fan shit. To be cheesy and quite frank, we (the fans - not me) control how this footage is to be used for the future and how it gets delivered to the fans. It's a cool thing that the NIN camp has let us do, to combine creative forces and come up with something for ourselves.

I am not aware of anything like this happening in the history of music. A worldwide collaborative high quality fan work. It was to be expected, with a personality like Trent Reznor evoking creativity and creating that personal contact with fans all over the world beautiful things can happen. I am excited to be part of this and I can't wait to see what we can do.