Vimeo should be rendered to 1280x720p MP4. If you are rendeirng to 1920x1080 you are rendering to a resolution Vimeo doesn't suppport and it will be rerendered by Vimeo to their chosen resolution and compression - that's probably what is causing quality issues with your video.

By the way, Vimeo now accepts up to 5GB uploades on their premium accounts.

srode is correct, and the same goes for youtube.

Render to 1280x720 30p (29,97) and your video won't be resized by either service.
Even Youtube, which claims to take 1080p, scales it down to 540, but leaves 720p alone.

After much experimentation and comparing of results, I have started using Handbrake instead of Vegas for my rendering, scaling and deinterlacing of my h.264 Vimeo/Youtube ready videos. For any given bitrate, the quality is better and the conversion is faster.

"After much experimentation and comparing of results, I have started using Handbrake instead of Vegas for my rendering, scaling and deinterlacing of my h.264 Vimeo/Youtube ready videos. For any given bitrate, the quality is better and the conversion is faster. "

Yep, and the new Handbrake 0.9.5 release appears to be a hit if you look at their forums. AC3 encoding is one of the new features.

Give Handbrake DNxHD in the original video's formatting, and do your resize / decomb / detelecine in HB, and you will be amazed at the results. I am in the process of preparing a tutorial for the uninitiated, which will end up on both YT and Vimeo.

Thanks for the replies. Here is a link to a recent short on vimeo http://vimeo.com/18565383
Looks good in HD on YT but very jerky in vimeo. I used the internet preset AVC 1920. I re-rendered it this morning to the 720 and am reposting it to see if it looks better. Knowing that they resize it to 720 makes sense. If it looks good I will use that from now on for internet stuff.
Thanks again!

Playback on Vimeo is jumpy on many systems and is a common complaint. It's a price we pay for better quality than YT.

I'm not sure about free accounts on Vimeo but Plus users can do 1080p.

Introducing 1080p playback and AVCHD support!

I've used Eugenia's settings for years with only mild tweaks as Vimeo upped their resolution/file size and haven't had the issues your describing, Vegas handles it just fine.

Exporting with Vegas for Vimeo HD

All that said 720 on Vimeo looks pretty amazing, the difference between 720 and 1080 streaming online is nearly negligible and most people won't even be able to see the difference quality wise. They may, however, have a harder time watching 1080p depending on their connection and hardware.

- Ray
Underground Planet

The video you provided the link to plays out fine all the way down under. I do have a reasonably fast internet connection and a moderately fast PC though.
Unfortunately though from my experience Vimeo's superior quality works against them compared to YT who also have fatter pipes to deliver content over. It doesn't matter how good it looks if the viewer will not hang around waiting for it to download or worse, if their PC isn't up to playing it out.

Bob.

Not sure about that, back in the day when I had to encode and host all my own stuff I went for a much higher quality than a lot of people could play but my feeling was I would rather them have to either way for the file or get on a different machine than see my work look all pixelated and compressed.

Obviously YouTube has come a long way since than in that regard but my feeling's are still very similar. YouTube, at least to me, as a platform doesn't have a very professional feel to it. Though I do eventually post most of my vids there and appreciate an audience wherever I can find one I don't embed from there nor do much to promote it. The control Vimeo gives me over my embeds is much more to my liking. As much as I may like "Charlie Bit My Finger" that doesn't mean I want it showing up at the end of my video's on my own site.

I think its pretty rare these days that someones pc isn't good enough to play anything on the net. I haven't had one person tell me that they couldn't play one of my vids from Vimeo. Some have had to let it buffer, some see it better if they toggle off HD, but no one has been unable to play it. And I myself pay extra for the Turbo on Road Runner, have a pretty robust system and still can't count the number of times I've had to wait for YouTube to buffer. Honestly I don't think that it's any better than Vimeo in that department.

Alas I ramble! Sorry bout that, suffice to say I use both but if I had to only use one I think it's fairly obvious where I would be putting my stuff.

- Ray
Underground Planet

I think Youtube leans toward online playability for the iPhone masses, and Vimeo leans toward quality on the assumption that the videophile crowd will probably download what they want to view anyway.

MUTTLEY,

When you embed youtube videos, you can turn off the related videos and other things that youtube tags on the end. The only thing you can't turn off is the youtube logo.

Dave T2

Thanks Dave, I stand corrected! Though for me that's still reason enough! =)

What can I say? I've been a fan of Vimeo for sometime now, prefer the interface, quality, community, just about everything. Not to mention the ability to swap a video out with a different version, that alone has been indispensable. It's almost a given with me that a week or two after posting a vid I find some little something that irks me and I make a subtle change or two, most of the time its nothing anyone other than me will notice but at least I can update the version that's up there without breaking any embeds or links. Also love that as srode mentioned they just increased their limit to 5 gigs for Plus users, can't see whats not to like!

- Ray
Underground Planet

I watched a few minutes of your video on vimeo and it was fine. No stuttering at all (and I do see stuttering on vimeo sometimes). Looks like one good fun event!

"I watched a few minutes of your video on vimeo and it was fine. No stuttering at all."

With this wedding clip of mine on Vimeo, I can't seem to get rid of the stuttering towards the end of the clip.

http://vimeo.com/18286299

lol@Dgates, I watched the whole thing to see what the prob was and it took me a good solid ten seconds after the insert before the light went on. Kinda hate ya right now, just sayin.

- Ray
Underground Planet

=]

In order to avoid cross-posting, I removed my previous post here and created another thread about Vimeo not allowing videos that are considered "commercial" even with the pro accounts.

>As much as I may like "Charlie Bit My Finger" that doesn't mean I want it showing up at the end of my video's on my own site

LOL! A while back I started a thread because of something like this. What happened is that I uploaded a video for my wife's non-profit, then as I was waiting for it to upload and convert, my 10 year old son walked into my studio and I showed him some funny Youtube videos. My first search was for "ugly people". What came up was a slideshow set to music of pictures from "uglypeople.com". Because of this little exercise, from that point on, any time somebody would watch my wifes video about giving school supplies to needy kids in third world countries, right afterwards the first video link that would come up would be one with a thumbnail of an amazingly fat woman in her underware on all fours with the caption "uglypeople.com". I never could get rid of this association, even with all the combined wisdom here.

For me the moral of this story is to use Vimeo when I can, but when I put the videos on Youtube, NEVER EVER watch anything at the same time as it's uploading and converting that you don't want associated with your project!

There is an exception to Vimeo's rules about posting "advertising" type videos. That is that churches and non-profits are allowed to do this. Since I work mostly with church and non-profits, a Vimeo pro account is extremely useful.