Can anyone chime in or direct me to a thread you know of on what is the best bitrate to target for that isn’t just wasted on upload to Vimeo. I’m curious what I should target an edit of some video down to in terms of length that comes in under their 5 gig cap.

I’ve seen the threads on encoding to the best bitrate and let Vimeo degrade it, but how much is just overkill when you are trying to maximize the length?

Quick follow-up after a few weeks of my membership on Vimeo and playing around – I’m finding that the Vimeo 1080p is for some reason way more difficult to playback than Youtube’s 1080p. This might be common knowledge here, but news to me. I’m searching on it now.

When they say it takes significant resources they aren’t kidding. So, reluctantly, I’m considering that encoding to 720p is likely the better option if a project of any length is what you are uploading. I’m new to all of this and to me if I have the cameras to shoot 1080p – I want to share the 1080p versions of what I have - as amateurish/home video as it might be.

I am starting to wonder if providing the best possible source doesn’t cut down on the choppiness on Vimeo? I’ve replaced a few clips with higher bitrate versions and they seem to possibly not be as choppy in playback. Dunno, just a few thoughts. Anyone who cares to chime in feel free. I’m searching on it here now looking for previous mentions of this.

Hi Jason,
When I upload my 1080p videos to Vimeo, I get a message saying that Vimeo will convert this to 720p.
It appears that you need to upgrade your Vimeo account to "Plus" if you want Vimeo to play your videos in 1080p.

(But I have never noticed any of the choppy playback you mention, when I play my videos there).

Yeah, I paid for the membership. Thought it might be worthwhile to join in their community if I am tinkering with making a documentary (that never seems to get worked on). Possibly any competitive streak I might have will push me to incorporate a little better effort in my videos generally.

Anyway, thanks for the reply. I’m fairly new to exploring Vimeo generally speaking. The 720p doesn’t present any choppy playback issues for me either. It’s the 1080p that I find seems to really, really play back horribly on my laptop that doesn’t have at least 1080 vertical resolution – I think I even tried
the ‘scaling’ option and it still choked on it. It’s not a particularly low power laptop either. It’s a dual core Intel – fairly new. No dice. I’m not sure I even tried other people’s Vimeo 1080p on it or not to see if it might be something I was doing or what.

It's the inefficiency of the Flash Player. Try using HTML5 to play the 1080p files or download the encoded file and play it offline with a media player that has hardware acceleration. Downloading the original is of no use since that is not what is playing back to everyone else.