Friday November 27th, over 1,2 million Norwegians watched parts of «Bergensbanen» on NRK2. The longest documentary ever? At least the longest we have made, almost 7 1/2 hours, showing every minute of the scenic train ride between Bergen on the Norwegian west coast, crossing the mountains to the capital of Oslo.

Bergensbanen is 100 years in 2009, and the documentary was a wild idea from NRK staff that came through, and was, surprisingly, a big success.

On Twitter, this became the thing to talk about in Norway. Over 1 000 tweets with #bergensbanen were posted, and even more when we ran the program again two days later.

Norwegian version – see «Bergensbanen – klar for avgang»

Now we want to give the material to our viewers, the whole thing, for download.



The documentary had picture-in-picture clips with videos about Bergensbanen, a reporter interviewing people on the train, music and two cameras pointing to the sides of the train. Because of rights, we had to remove the music and many videoclips, so we decided to make a clean front camera version for this download. It’s recorded on a Sony 700 camera in XDCAM HD 1080 50i. The camera has a 30 seconds buffer, making it possible to switch disks when needed. So we have a continuous recording of 7 hours.

Bittorrent

The original file was 165 GB, too much for most people to download. We coded a 720 50P, 1280×720 version, resulting in a 22 GB file. You need a filesystem on your drive that takes files bigger than 4 GB. Most external drives have a FAT32 filesystem, which has a limit of 4 GB. NTFS and HFS+ works fine.

Download the torrentfile here.

Update: The original HD-file is now out

We have published a HUGE 246 GB file. The article describing it is only in Norwegian, but the basics are: It’s an Apple ProRes file, it’s 246 GB and the adress to the torrentfile is:

http://nl.nrk.no/torrent/bergensbanen/Bergensbanen.1080i50.ProRes422.Nrk.mov.torrent



More information on our bittorent services, see se nrkbeta.no/bittorrent (in Norwegian). More about NRKbeta (in English).

Creative Commons

We have chosen to make the train journey available with a Creative Commons-license.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

You are free to…

to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work.

to Remix — to adapt the work

You can edit the work, color correct it, put on graphics, play backwards, anything, as long as you follow the terms in the license.

Under the following conditions…

Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

All your derivative works must be marked with the URL to http://nrkbeta.no/bergensbanen. If you make something for the web, the link should be clickable. Videos should have both a clickable link in the text description and this text superimposed at the end:

«Bergensbanen» – NRK

http://nrkbeta.no/bergensbanen

Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.

Everything you make from our work, must have the same Creative Commons license. Which rules out using other people’s work (unless they also are Creative Commons or similiar), because you have to share your work with the same license.

Commercial use

The work is also licensed for commercial use. But again, you have to make your work available with the same Creative Commons license.

Summary

You can share and remix the work – also commercially – as long as you credit NRK and link to http://nrkbeta.no/bergensbanen and use the same Creative Commons license on your work. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.

Competition

If you understand Norwegian, we’re running a competition with a chance to win a HD videocamera. See the Norwegian version of this article

Here’s a 10 minute video, from Finse where the scenes from Hoth in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back were filmed.

reddit, delicious and Digg

If you’re a reddit-user, the discussion is here.

Here’s the page on delicious if you want to save it for later.

Also, if you’re on Digg – please digg it.

Comments or questions?

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to ask in the commentsfield below, in English. We’ll be happy to hear your thoughts and answer your questions. For Norwegian comments, please use the corresponding Norwegian version of this article.

About NRK and NRKbeta

NRK is The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (Norwegian: Norsk rikskringkasting AS), which is usually known as the NRK, is the Norwegian government-owned radio and television public broadcasting company, and the largest media organisation in Norway. It is a founding member of the European Broadcasting Union. Our main website is nrk.no. For English information about us, see our aboutpage or the English Wikipedia-entry on NRK.

NRKbeta is NRKs technology blog. From time to time we publish English articles. See our aboutpage.