When I upload 720/50p footage from my ex1 to vimeo/exposureroom etc... it never plays correctly. I tried some kind of settings without succes. I use the settings that recommend this webs but the footage with a lot of movements (steadicam) plays with a lot of stutter. Can you give me some advice?
thanks

EXACTLY what settings did you use?
Why not post the link to the video so we can see what's wrong? How do you know it's not your internet connection?

I think isn't my internet connection because I can see other people videos without problem. If I upload videos at 720/25p they plays good. Only have a problem with 50p.
I encoded in h264 and tried diferent bit rates 3000, 3500,4000...
Deleted the videos until I find good settings. I you can give me some advice of new settings I will post the link with the results

When Vimeo encodes video it converts them all to 24p. It does a poor job of changing the frame rate and drops frames. I'm wondering if that's the problem since you say 25p looks good and 50p does not.

I know YouTube is now allowing 720p24, 720p25, 720p30. As a test, upload video to YouTube and see if it does a good conversion from 50p to 25p.

Thanks Craig,
I think this is the problem. I will try if Compressor can do a better conversion 50p>25p to upload 25p footage. If anyone know the better settings to do this I'll be greatiful

Here's a brand new tutorial on how to do it in Compressor:

Converting Frame Rates in Compressor (http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/converting_frame_rates_compressor.html)

Note this comment in the article description:
"Remembering that we always want to convert frame rates up"

Worth giving it a try but Carlos needs to convert DOWN to 25p (or 24p which is ideal for Vimeo).

In fact the article says converting down results in choppy video which is what Vimeo does and why the video looks choppy in the first place. That said, Compressor's results should be better than Vimeo's.

I have tried the converting down from 30p to 24p for vimeo and have not been pleased as Craig stated you always want to convert up.

Was all set to have my demo and a few other videos run embedded on my site with Vimeo Plus. But it looks like I will cancel the account in the 30-day time frame until a different solution hits the market.

30p is generally difficult to convert to either 24p or 25p. The reason is that 30p has no fields to divide. That's why it's often recommended to not shot 30p for international distribution.

The problem with Vimeo is they convert everything to 24p and do a poor job of it. They should be able to accept 25p and 30p but they do not. While TV sets may be PAL or NTSC specific, computers do not have to be. Vimeo has claimed in the past that some computers have a hard time decoding frame rates above 24p. Their reasoning is "twisted" though in my opinion. Instead of "some" people getting dropped frames because they can't decode 25p or 30p, EVERYONE gets dropped frames at video badly converted to 24p (unless you shoot 24p).

Mind you NONE of this happens on YouTube which handles 25p and 30p just fine. So you can pay $60 for Vimeo's 2GB per week limit and get BAD frame rate conversions or you can use YouTube, play at your native frame rate, have no weekly limit.

True Vimeo has some nice features but if all my HD video has dropped frames the other features have limited value.

I brought up the frame rate issue with Vimeo staff about 7 months ago and they were very defensive.

Craig thanks for the helpful input. I also talked with the staff at Vimeo and they were not receptive to my request. I will give Utube 720P 30p a try and see what I get. Most of my shoots are 30p due to clients request so that is my preferred choice or 720p 30p/60p for over cranked.

Most of my shoots are 30p due to clients request so that is my preferred choice or 720p 30p/60p for over cranked.
I think that 30p is a very good choice because almost all computer-displays are running at 60Hz, which is an integral multiple of 30. So it can be watched on them perfectly smooth. Also the look of 30p is a great tradeoff between that 24p-film-look and that 60p-reality-look.

Ultimately what it comes down to is that unless you're shooting 24p specifically, Vimeo is not a good place to show professional HD work.

It's ironic given that YouTube is considered a "playpen" and Vimeo wanted to be the place for "serious artists."

I've had viewers and clients contact me about the dropped frames on my Vimeo posts (not that I have much there). I'd been uploading HD using their password protect feature to send to specific people (not for public viewing).

As an alternative one might try
ExposureRoom - Providing Exposure & Opportunity for Talent (http://exposureroom.com/)
as another alternative.

Craig thanks for the helpful input. I also talked with the staff at Vimeo and they were not receptive to my request. I will give Utube 720P 30p a try and see what I get. Most of my shoots are 30p due to clients request so that is my preferred choice or 720p 30p/60p for over cranked.

Dominik I also like 30p look better luckily my clients agree who know the difference and the ones who don’t I show them options and help them decide.

Thanks Craig I will check out Exposure Room. For some clients I post on a hidden page on my site and they do not mind the extra upload time. Also Blu-Ray burner on the way this week for my Mac Pro so one more options to FedEx out rewriteable disk to the client.

Dominik, Interesting that you say that coming from a PAL based country. You make some key points though.

Computers are frame rate agnostic. Higher frame rate is better temporal resolution. Computer don't suffer from the PAL/NTSC restraints. With more efficient codecs, faster computers, faster internet connections, decoding is becoming less of a problem.

For me, I shoot for TV, Digital Signage, the web. 30p (in an NTSC country) meets all those needs. I have had to shoot 60i and 60p when shooting sports though. Both of those convert to 30p fairly easily when needed.

24p has been the "international" standard because it can be converted to 60i by adding pull down and 25p (or 50i) with a very small speed change. Some would say it produces a smaller compressed file for the internet given that it has fewer frames. The problem is some of us are unhappy with the temporal resolution of 24p.

There's Carlos' case where 50p gives him better temporal resolution at the source but it doesn't easily convert to 24p (at least the way Vimeo is doing it). It could convert to 25p but Vimeo stubbornly holds to 24p. The result is that very HD few frame rates play well on Vimeo.

YouTube handles 24, 25, 30 so those as well as 50 and 60 (which are more easily downconverted to 25 and 30) handles motion much better.

What also may be at issue is On2VP6 decode vs H.264. On2 updated VP6 to include a simpler profile (but at the potential cost of quality) for HD encode decode. Vimeo probably went with On2VP6 (and I'm not sure if they're using the simpler profile for HD) because they may have felt that H.264 flash was not widely decoded at the time. Adobe updated player, capable of H.264 decode spread very quickly though. On the encode side On2VP6 has a fairly expensive cost too which is not the case for H.264.

So it seems that many hosting sites jumped on H.264 Flash when they felt market penetration was high enough while Vimeo, early HD adaptor, is using the expensive (for them) and probably harder to decode On2VP6 Flash which may be why they don't have the frame rate playback other sites do.

Not only is YouTube using H.264 Flash allowing 24, 25, 30fps, they are encoding at a higher data rate too. Vimeo seems to be at about 1800kbps whereas YouTube seems to be an avg of 2000kbps allowing for brief peaks up to 4000kbps.

Basically we're getting to the point where someone with a 5000kbps internet connection can watch 720p HD coming from the web. That's why so many are arguing that Blu-ray may not really catch on the was DVD did.

We're getting closer to the point where you can watch HD web on HDTV. My main computer has a graphics card with 2 DVI out. I have a DVI to HDMI cable going to my 46" HDTV. I can drag a YouTube web page with an HD video on it to the HDTV and play the video in full screen mode. It's certainly not Blu-ray but it's pretty cool to be able to do that. I do that with Vimeo and the dropped frames look really bad. Vimeo has the advantage that you can turn scaling off so you get 720 whereas YouTube scales it to 1080 so it looks a bit soft.

I think that 30p is a very good choice because almost all computer-displays are running at 60Hz, which is an integral multiple of 30. So it can be watched on them perfectly smooth. Also the look of 30p is a great tradeoff between that 24p-film-look and that 60p-reality-look.

I tried to convert 50p video in 720/25p with compressor without special settings and the result was very bad. I don't know if I did it in the best way. In exposureroom also had choppy video. I can't try youtube at the moment because I need password protect so the client don't have the final work yet.
Is important to me to find a solution because in some projects that needs fast movements or steadicam, 720/50p (pal area) is the better option to me.

You might need to try using Compressor's Frame Controls Retiming feature which uses Optical Flow technology.

The first step is to check results on the computer. It should play back 25p smoothly on your computer before uploading.

To convert 50p to 25p there's nothing more to do then to drop every second frame. You don't need advanced techiques like optical flow for that. 50p to 24p conversion for vimeo of course will benefit a lot from optical flow, but it will take a lot of render time.

Having "choppy video" on Flash video playback may be caused by the speed of your CPU. I know that on my previous MacBookPro (single processor G5) it would have to work really hard just to play a Flash video without dropping frames. One thing to check (if you're on a Mac) is to launch the Activity Monitor and then Window>CPU History. This will show you how hard your CPU is running when viewing a Flash movie. If the graph is showing that your CPU is maxed out, that may be why you're dropping frames.

On the other hand, if you're NOT having trouble viewing other people's Flash videos, then forget everything I just wrote above. :)

Hey just a thought but why not upload to your own site and let them download it or play it there? I encoded a few versions of a 5 min production to mp4 and it worked well coming from a EX3 1080I source. I encoded in compressor (Mac) converting to progressive frames (25fps). If you have your own site or ftp isn't this easier?

Evan

Mitchell for me it is not CPU with dual quad core 3.0 and 16GB of ram the machine is not even working when it views the footage. It is a Vimeo problem.

Evan I do upload to a hidden page but letting them download is not an option since most of the footage is right protected from a few TV shows. That is what intrigued me with Vimeo Plus you could have it play on your site only and no download. For me high quality is a must and their footage is not there yet.

Dominik, Carlos said he used Compressor without any special settings (optical flow) and was not happy with the results. Sometimes theory and practice are very different. If dropping every second frame doesn't look good (after all you are changing the temporal resolution) there's no reason why not trying optical flow. Maybe it's created frames based on the motion estimation will do a better job, maybe not. With technology NEVER assume the "white paper" matches reality.

In fact if dropping every 2nd frame where fine that Carlos' 50p wouldn't look too bad as a Vimeo convert. I suspect Vimeo going from 25p to 24p drops fewer frames than 30p to 24p.

Basically Vimeo has a serious frame rate conversion issue and one must do the frame rate conversation yourself if you are to use Vimeo. Not of this is necessary with YouTube.

To convert 50p to 25p there's nothing more to do then to drop every second frame. You don't need advanced techiques like optical flow for that. 50p to 24p conversion for vimeo of course will benefit a lot from optical flow, but it will take a lot of render time.

Craig, I do it like you said and the results are far better. No perfect but not bad. I upload a clip to Vimeo and though that 25p>24p don't would be very agressive but it was a disaster. Now I'm uploading to expossure room. In an hour or less I post the link

Carlos, looking forward to the ExposureRoom link.

Other experiments might be: once you convert 50p to 25p, do a speed change to 24p and use that as your source to upload. Another might be go directly from 50p to 24p using optical flow. Of course you could try uploading your 50p to YouTube and see how that handles it. At the very least YouTube should handle 25p better than Vimeo since it doesn't do any frame conversion at all.

Because with optical flow the 50>25p conversion was better I'll try that you said, directly to 24p. You now if youtube will allow in the futures view 720 footage without upscale to 1080?

The video in expossure room. It's the better I find at the moment. Let me know if you find it jerky or something. I think is so good vs vimeo
Carlos Padilla On ExposureRoom (http://exposureroom.com/members/Carlos.aspx/assets/7f349868cf114140ac668dba9469b185/)

Password: Patr

Sometimes theory and practice are very different.
I wouldn't accept that. ;)
Maybe it's created frames based on the motion estimation will do a better job, maybe not.
The results will be in both cases 100% identical. Try it, if you don't believe me.
Btw, the biggest error-source there is: the user.
You now if youtube will allow in the futures view 720 footage without upscale to 1080?
Which upscale? Do you mean full-screen-mode?

Dominique I had done the 50>25p conversion with and without using Compressor's Frame Controls Retiming and obtained better results with this option without dubt.

Which upscale? Do you mean full-screen-mode?
sorry, you are right. I'm refer to the full screen mode (in my monitors 1920x1080), and the not option to view 720 footage in his size.

Dominique I had done the 50>25p conversion with and without using Compressor's Frame Controls Retiming and obtained better results with this option without dubt.
There are two possibilities:
1. You did a mistake (did choose frame-blending instead of optical flow or didn't do a 50p->25p-conversion but something else)
2. placebo-effect

Can you post examples? I just tried it myself and the results are 100% identical like expected (I subtracted the frames in AFX to be sure there's no difference).

Dominique I delete the video without optical flow because the movements were jerky. The conversion with optical flow is the video you can see above. The difference is not little.
1- I choose optical flow in the second one and not in the first.
2- Placebo effect... ok, I was finding a solution and this seems work to me. If anyone that view the video has the same placebo effect that me, are fine.

If you obtains the same results don't do it. Its easy, but believe me, in my case the difference isn't a little interpretation, is fluid movements vs jerky movements.

I'm pretty sure there's a mistake around here. But without comparing both of your results I won't be able to tell.