My first video experience reminded me just how poorly YouTube videos can look. What seemed fine on my desktop was turned into a poor sounding, blocky mess.
A while back, Shaun, from UpstateInteractive.com gave me some great advice - for posting videos on the web, check out vimeo.com. He claimed they post in higher quality.
Today, I gave it a try, and sure enough, the video quality is much improved. From Window Movie Maker, I said to Publish the movie for playing on my computer, which produced a 45 meg file. Vimeo was happy to upload a file of that size. I'd share the video with y'all, but it hasn't been approved by the editorial team (translation: Shira won't let me till she blesses it). When it's available, you know it will be online.
Vimeo is also an excellent example of a site that is incredibly polished. Uploading and processing video, in Net terms, is extremely slow. They made the process as smooth as possible by:
- Starting the upload as soon as I filled in the file input box
- The upload progress meter gave me constant feedback
- While the file was uploading, I was encouraged to fill out details about my video, including changing pages
- When the video was uploaded (all 45 meg worth), they told me how long it was going to take to process it
- Whenever I viewed the video page, I'd get an update saying how long I had to wait before the video was processed
- Finally, when the video was there, the page refreshed to showed it to me
If you're doing any sort of web app that needs to do time consuming operations, check these guys out.
Thanks for the tip Shaun!
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