Ok, so my topic of discussion here is relatively simple, but it's been gone over a thousand times so bear with me on this as I do have some logic behind it.

With everything I've seen on it and all the playing around with it I've done, I'm still not convinced that the video compression guidelines that Vimeo tells us to export videos at is actually how to achieve the best looking quality uploads.

My general go to is a rather odd one that I swear unless I'm crazy looks better than the uploads I've done per their guideline. I use the same input resolution and frame rate as my output, keyframes are same as framerate but I render a CBR 9mb/s with Widescreen 16:9 pixels. I don't have any of the additional "render at maximum depth" or "use max render quality" boxes checked, only "use previews" as I usually pre-render my footage.

Up until recently I decided that I liked how this was looking, but when I uninstalled CS5 to upgrade to 5.5 I lost my presets. I rebuilt the old ones, but wanted to play around with encodes again to see if I really did come up with the best solution.

Anyhow, I was wondering if any of you Premiere users out there wanted to share what you think is the best setting for Vimeo when uploading some HDSLR footage to Vimeo. Maybe I am just crazy, but this has been bugging me for ages now.

I actually use 12Mbps cbr, 1920x1080, i'm not at my edit suite just now but i'll post a screenshot of the settings tomorrow.

Yeah I think the Bitrate here is the contributing factor for the most part. I've done testing to Square vs 16x9 pixel aspect ratio and that doesn't seem to really affect it too much.

Like I said I match output res and rate to the input, although I have down-rezzed 1080 to 720 and I think a lot of it has to do with that as well in those cases.

I'm just adhering to the Garbage in Garbage out adage here. I'm aware that I'm not going to get super amazing quality out of Vimeo, but when I'm seeing stuff that straight looks better than mine and I can tell it's in the encoding, it bothers me.

When I read the thread topic, I was thinking that somebody was asking about how to create dead horse beating sound effects for a short film... :)

Anyway... your experience hints at Vimeo re-encoding no matter what one delivers. In that case, deliver all the quality that your network connection can offer!

as promised

Thanks James, do you know what you set keyframes to?

Key frames are same as frame rate , so for 25p, key krames 25, for 30p, keyframe 30and so on