After releasing several albums of fantastic music for free online, Trent Reznor and nine inch nails have raised the bar on being downright awesome by releasing entire concerts’ worth of multi-cam HD raw video, complete with Final Cut Pro sequences ready for editing.

From forum.nin.com:

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.

[…]

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

Previously, nine inch nails has released several of their songs in GarageBand format, enabling fans to remix them to their hearts’ content. Now I wish I had enough spare time (and spare hard drive space) to sit down and edit these videos. I attended the Orlando stop of the “Lights in the Sky” tour and loved every minute of it. I’ll definitely download at least one of these released video bundles just to relive the concert. Time to find a couple hundred gigs of space to free up…

Thanks Trent! You rock.