In case you readers don’t know, I am tremendous fan of Trent Reznor and his main “band”, Nine Inch Nails. His most recent (and possibly final) large arena tour was his biggest yet. Trent has always been on the bleeding edge of technology and incorporating said tech into his live shows. The Lights in the Sky tour was no different.

Trent had planned on filming the last few stops on this tour in 3D and doing a theatrical run, but in what seems to be a typical chain of events, record companies let him down and ruined the opportunity. Instead of professional filming, Trent instituted an “all cameras allowed” policy, regardless of the venue’s preference. Following this announcement, many HD cameras were brought into the audience and were subsequently used to film several shows. What followed was something incredibly unique, a gift from the band that was totally unexpected…

In early January 2009, Trent & company released nearly 400GB of HD footage from three separate shows in the form of three torrents. This was completely raw, unedited, untouched & uncompressed HD video from consumer and prosumer grade HD cameras. Trent felt bad for the falling through of his filming plans, so decided to deliver the next best thing: complete artistic freedom. Fans were encouraged to edit the shows themselves, and do with the footage what they liked.

Most recently, a professional video editor named Colin Cooper released several edits on his Vimeo page. Many users (including myself) requested full versions of the show he edited. And as of this week, Colin has definitely delivered.

Colin has made the entire Victoria show available in three different formats:

• Small - MPEG4, Sub-HD quality at 2.3GB
• Medium - M4V 720p HD quality at 4.7GB
• Large - Apple HDV 1080i HD quality at 25.5GB

Unbelievable! The ability to download this show in multiple HD formats is absolutely fantastic. Having attended the tour ourselves, Austin and I can attest first hand to how amazing it truly was. As of last night I’ve downloaded and already begun watching the 720p version, and I can tell you it is an incredible thing to have for any NIN fan. And even better; I’ve started downloading the uncompressed 25GB version, but I suspect that’ll be going for quite a while.

The one and only negative part is that Trent’s vocal chords are nearly shot in this show, since it’s on the end of the tour. But this shouldn’t stop you from downloading and enjoying this totally legal HD video. Opportunities like this don’t come very often, and Trent Reznor is one of the few visionaries that truly understand how things “work” in the tech world. He’s a pioneer, and his work (as well as Colin’s in this case) is well worth the bandwidth.

We can only hope Colin decides to edit together the other two shows that were included in this amazing 400GB gift from Nine Inch Nails.