LITTLE ROCK — So you have a video you want to post online. You go to YouTube, right? Not necessarily.
HD video hosting online has more options than you might think. Along with Facebook, Dailymotion, Viddler and Google Video, the video-sharing website Vimeo provides an alternate hosting site for serious content creators looking to be embraced by passionate community.
YouTube is the most popular choice among average digital content up-loaders. YouTube gets more than 2 billion views daily, with more than 100 million viewers. It’s the third-most visited website after Google (which bought the site in 2006) and Facebook. Its free hosting services and user-friendly interface have made it a cultural phenomenon.
Until recently, YouTube videos were limited to 10 minutes but they’ve lately been increased to 15 minutes in high definition and up to 2 gigabytes in size. YouTube also allows you to upload videos in various codecs, or compression formats. The site suggests MPEG-4, 3GPP and MOV files, which includes the popular H264 codec that can be exported with QuickTime Pro or various video editing software. You can also upload Windows-formatted AVI and WMV files. Many people cite YouTube for its lack of quality; however, with its high-definition capability (1,080 or 720 pixel resolution), the quality, depending on bit-rate, is comparable to other HD-capable hosting sites.
Vimeo (vimeo.com) has been around longer than YouTube, starting in 2004. It has a much smalleruser base with only 3 million members and approximately 16,000 uploaded videos daily.
Within the broadcast and film community, Vimeo is reputed to have better video quality than YouTube, but that isn’t technically true. Both sites support the same HD playback but Vimeo got there first, debuting a video hosting site that supported HD in 2007.
What’s really different about Vimeo is the community it’s attracted. Browsing the site’s comments and forums, you will notice a world of difference from YouTube. Vimeo encourages constructive criticism on their site and generally comments stay mostly respectful of a user’s work. YouTube comments are often derogatory and offtopic, which is understandable due to anonymity and the vastnumber of users who leave comments.
Vimeo’s basic services are free but limit you to 500 megabytes and one HD upload each week. A $59.99 a year Vimeo Plus account gives you the ability to upload as many HD videos you want - so long as you don’t exceed your weekly allotted 5 gigabytes of data.
The breakdown between the two sites becomes quality versus quantity - or, maybe more precisely, quality versus exposure. Vimeo isn’t concerned with hyping viral videos or clips from Saturday Night Live, but with highlighting original content.
Vimeo does not have many of the marketing tools, such as sharing on social networking sites, YouTube does and thatmay be a good or bad thing depending on what you want to do with your video. If you’ve made a short film you don’t want embedded on dozens of blogs and Facebook pages, you might not want it to be passed around the Internet through Twitter.
It all depends on what you want your video to do: Do you want it to have a chance to be seen by millions with no specific interest in your content, or appreciated by a handful of like-minded content creators?
Levi Agee is a programmer for the Little Rock Film Festival and the founder and host of Cameras on the Radio. E-mail him at:
MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 10/29/2010