Interesting.

The first two things to hit me were: lack of compression artifacts; and apparent softness to my eyes. I think the former is very positive, as this is what ruins some vimeo videos for me. I tried to verify the softness. I suspected it was not in the original.

I downloaded the .mov file and rendered to 720p using Handbrake. To me, the handbrake render looked better (even at the super-low rate that they might be using, based on the reported size of the vimeo 720p file). It was crisper and LOOKED sharper and of higher resolution. Of course, the question is whether this looks as sharp once re-uploaded and re-encoded on vimeo. I suggest uploading the handbrake render to compare (I didn't want to load your content to my vimeo space).

Thanks for sharing. It would be interesting to see some other experiments that might have more test-worthy material.


Edit: Laurence - just to be clear, I meant nothing negative in my "test-worthy" comment. It wasn't intended to be a critique of your video's content, etc.. I was simply trying to allude to something like a video with fine detail (ducks or peacocks, anyone?), lots of moving objects, etc. Your video was great for what it was. Sorry if my comment might have come off as a backhanded comment on the video itself. All of my comments are on the video quality, based on compression, scaling, etc.

It was an 8 bit DNxHD encode at the highest of the preset bitrates.

No offense taken. I have the original of course and the Vimeo DNxHD Vimeo encode is softer. The color space is also exaggerated in this Vimeo encode slightly, which I don't totally dislike. I really like the lack of compression artifacts compared to my usual Handbrake render. One positive side effect of the softening is that there was a little moiré on the bricks in several places that was knocked down a notch. It also seems to buffer less, especially considering that it is 1080p. I think that the lack of compression artifacts maybe made for a more compact encode (but I'm not sure). I think I went through my whole weeks allotment of upload space in this one upload. Again, it was an accident, but an interesting one (to me at least).

This has got me thinking about bumping up the quality on my Handbrake renders. I don't see much difference past a constant quality of 20 in Handbrake, but it is quite possible that the Vimeo encoders might.

First post mentioned YouTube then rest was about Vimeo, just FYI it works great on YouTube.

My mistake . I meant Vimeo, and fixed it. So you've uploaded DNxHD to YouTube and it looked good?

Worked well in YouTube, I used the small 36_8bit flavor