Pre-review of Vimeo Plus

I really like Vimeo's overall site design, philosophy, and for lack of a better word, "culture". And they've never screwed up their quality with total anti-panache, as YouTube has. I asked several esteemed artists why they have their craft on Vimeo, including the amazing Scott Pagano (Neither-Field), and they all replied with similar answers.

Vimeo has my fave embed widget. It's unintrusive unlike YouTube's, and not as hard-to-read as blip.tv's. Those are the 2 other main video sites I use right now.

I've been thinking to upgrade to Vimeo Plus and note they have what amounts to a 30-day money-back guarantee. I like that a lot.

Here's what's really appealing about Vimeo Plus:

• Priority uploading. I'm often in a hurry to see my video after it's uploaded. My process pipeline has more steps than I'd care to do, so anything that speeds this up so the video can be shown off is wonderful. If you produce multimedia content, you'll relate.
• High (2-pass encoding) video quality. A subtle but nice way to attract people (like me) who want that level of finesse. But it's also a bit dangerous because it leads to mostly correct assumptions that standard Vimeo quality is worse than blip.tv, as I found out on secondlife.com/video yesterday: in my new "Make winter sky and ice!" tut, UI elements were messily smeared and grainer (instead of the flat color they should be) than their blip.tv counterpart. It's not clear if 2-pass encoding applies retroactively, so I'll ask on the forums. I'll really need to test this deeply to understand it better. Here's a comparison for you to judge:

Further quality observations:

• blip.tv has a higher-quality thumbnail, but you don't have the easy choice (pick 1 out of 12) that Vimeo gives you, which is the best I've seen.
• blip.tv is worse at coping with lots of motion, which is very obvious after the title card transition at the beginning.
• Vimeo's overall resolution for standard quality is less. Very noticeable when both players, as shown above, are scaled to the same size.
• The market is wide open for someone to popularize a much better codec for screencasts like this need to show fine UI elements.
• And what the heck is up with my pink + green avatar looking so blocky on both? I've noticed this flaw on many otherwise superb codecs which pixelate solid colors, including blue. Like Apple's gamma-shift issue, it's shameful it hasn't already been fixed.

With Vimeo Plus, I'm up in the air about:

• Storage space — only "2GB a week"? That used to be a lot of space, but if I wanted to batch-upload all my video tutorials to Vimeo, there's (1) no batch uploader and (2) I'd have to do it piecemeal across a few weeks. I currently have 8.96 GB of MP4 vidtut files which end up getting uploaded to various sites. This doesn't include promos and other vids I've done. Granted, this is less of an issue going forward.
• "Player customization" sounds nice but I'll have to use it to get it. I wonder what happens if I embed a customized player and later leave Plus; I didn't see that answered.
• Price. They have a cheeky, clever mention of "That's $5 a month, $1.15 a week, 16 cents a day… well, you get the point." Nonetheless, $60/year is still more than double Flickr's $25/year for a pro account. I understand Vimeo has significantly less resources and funding than Flickr. Also, video is bound to be a lot more bandwidth-intensive, which is likely why there are only 1,000 HD embedded plays (not per week or month but total, it seems) for a Plus account. For my needs, this limit isn't compelling, and I can see artists encouraging people to go right to Vimeo (driving traffic) to view the full HD version on a page, or simply downloading a QuickTime file hosted on a cheap webhost with tons of bandwidth (like DreamHost, which I'm on). Not as integrated, but workable.

One feature I wish Vimeo had: jumbo-size "thumbnails" (which aren't really thumbnails), which would come in handy for using as the featured image on the front of my blog. I usually rely on grabbing an existing Flickr pic or editing a screengrab, but gets laborious over multiple runs.

The other stuff, I either don't care that much about (shows where my priorities lie, eh?).

Do you use Vimeo? What are your thoughts on this?

Tagged as: General