Uploading to Vimeo

I’ve had a few people ask me what are the best specs for uploading a video to Vimeo, and I might not know what the “best” are, but I know what works really good for us. I did not use these settings upon joining Vimeo. It did take some troubleshooting, but here is where I finally landed…

First off, we use the Quicktime Player 7’s Quicktime Pro version. It cost $30 on Apples website. Now just because we use Quicktime Pro does not mean it is the only, and best apllication out there. There are others applications that do the job too. We just prefer the speed and results from QT Pro.

 

The setting we use in QT Pro are as follows:

Upon opening a movie file with QT Pro, I selected EXPORT. Then a window opening, and from there I change the EXPORT OPTION to MOVIE TO MPEG-4.

 

Then, click on OPTIONS. A new window will open. In this window, I set the VIDEO FORMAT to H.264, and I set the data rate to 3500 because most of the time I have lots of movement in my videos. For talking heads, I set it to about 1500. I set it optimized for streaming, and change the image size to CUSTOM, and use 640X360. These dimensions are pretty typical to web movies.

 

As for the audio settings, I rarely change these. Most of the time I do not see much of a change in file size by changing the audio settings. Below are the specs that I use.

 

From there click OK, and then SAVE. Then I upload the video to Vimeo. I use Vimeo instead of Youtube, just because I feel like Youtube has more viewers that are random. I see more of my artist-type peers on Vimeo. Check out our videos on Vimeo here.