Staff Blog

The Vimeo staff care about you! All of you. We care so much, we made public service announcements reminding you to join us for the Vimeo Super Meetup Party.

Watch all our Vimeo PSAs!

Don't forget, if you can't make it to the New York meet up, maybe you can make it to one of the stops on the Vimeo World Tour. Join the Vimeo Meetup Group to see all the videos, and details for upcoming meet ups that could be happening near you.

If you're able to make it to the New York meet up, be sure to introduce yourself! You can officially start getting excited because we have some absolutely amazing things planned including a few surprises...

See you Saturday, August 15, 2009 at 8:00 p.m.!

Most people like having their picture taken. Photos express certain moments, events and people in an instant. What if you could extend that instant? With long portraits, you can. This weekend, we want you to make long portraits of people you know.

Long Portrait: The long portrait is a video made popular on Vimeo by photographer Clayton Cubitt . A long portrait is exactly like it sounds, a portrait that is long. It's like a photo of someone, but stretched out in video form to show the person's small expressions, mannerisms and gestures.

Check out an example of Clayton's here, as well as a less serious example made by some of the staff here.

Make sure you add your videos to the Weekend Project Group.

The prize: The best Long Portrait will get you 250MB more upload space or 5,000 HD embeds (for Plus users). The runner up will receive 100MB more upload space or 1,000 HD embeds (for Plus users).

Your videos are due on Tuesday, August 4, 2009 by midnight (EST).

Have a good weekend, and remember, the more creative or interesting, the better. This can be a serious and extremely fun project. We look forward to seeing what you guys come up with.


UPDATE:

Whoa! You guys really rocked it on this project. It was amazing to see so many diverse faces and how expressive or un-expressive some people are. Check out all the videos here - Long Portraits.

Here are our winners:
First place goes to Sam McCready for his long portrait of his dog, Berry, "BHNTb Berry Long Portrait". Sam, you will be receiving 250MB more upload space.

The runner-up is SogandB for his long portrait. You will be receiving 100MB more upload space.

Thanks to everybody who participated! This was a very successful weekend project!

We're coming to Europe! That's right, we're kicking off a world tour right after the Vimeo Super Meetup in New York. For 11 days, Karen and I will be traveling to Berlin, Paris, and London, hosting Vimeo Offline parties, meeting as many wonderful Vimeo peeps as possible, and interviewing popular Vimeo creators. We'll be making a sweetacular video blog for the whole trip, so if you can't make it to one of these events, or if you live on a different continent, you can follow along!

While we're in each city, we will be hosting a Vimeo Offline screening and afterparty with sets by VJ's on Vimeo. Think of it as as the perfect time to meet fellow Vimians in your city, chat with Karen and I, and watch some great videos made by people from your city. The venues are still being confirmed, but we've got some pretty cool spots lined up, and the events are shaping up to be pretty rad. Here are the dates so far:

BERLIN, August 19th
Venue: Stattbad Gallery - Gerichtstr 65 13347 Berlin, Germany +49 30 86383155 - 9pm screening followed by a kick-ass dance party with VJ performances by Raquel Meyers - raquelmeyers.com

PARIS, August 22nd
Venue: Dune 18, AV. ClAUDE VELLEFAUX 75010 PARIS - 8pm with a screening of videos by Vimeo members followed by dance party and VJ performances by Charlie Mars - vimeo.com/charlimars

LONDON, August 27 (Tentative)
Our venue for the London event recently fell through. If anyone knows of a cool spot for our screening/party, please let me know.

Dates are subject to change, but we'll keep you posted on all the juicy details.

GET INVOLVED:

First, join the Vimeo World Tour Group to get all the updates, watch the video blogs of the trip as we make them, and add any videos you might take at the events.

Second, if you are from any of the cities (or surrounding areas) and you know you are coming, submit your video by posting a link here and maybe we'll screen your video.

We're really excited about the tour and we hope to see as many of you there as possible. Make sure to save the dates and tell all your friends!

Ever feel like your life needs to be a little bit more animated? Come to our Vimeo Offline!

Join us this Wednesday for an awesome evening of animation from my personally curated channel, Everything Animated. Experience the best 3D, 2D, Pixelation, and Photomotion animation our community has to offer.

Vimeo Offline: Animation
Wednesday, July 15th at 8pm.
@ Monkey Town, 58 N. 3rd St, Brooklyn, NY.

Hope to see you there!

Hey guys,

So you like funny stuff right? Here at Vimeo we love it! Funny things keep us alive, and allow us to work without coffee (well...sometimes). So this weekend we want you to make us laugh hard, with a mockumentary.

Here's how to make a mockumentary:

Choose a serious topic that you find interesting, and then cleverly poke fun at it through the magic of film. Mockumentaries should include regular documentary filming techniques like interviews, and cool B Roll footage. Steve and I made a short mockumentary to give you some ideas.

Make sure you add your videos to the Weekend Project Group. Also, please only add videos you make specifically for this project.

The prize: The best mockumentary will get you 250MB more upload space or 5,000 HD embeds (for Plus users). The runner up will receive 100MB more upload space or 1,000 HD embeds (for Plus users).

Your videos are due on Tuesday, July 14, 2009 by midnight (EST).

Have a great weekend! We look forward to seeing what you guys create.

UPDATE:

Thanks for all the videos. It was awesome to see you show a little funny bone and film some great stuff.

Here are our winners:

First place goes to Justin Barker for his film, "The Skipping Craze" ( vimeo.com/groups/weekendproject/videos/5549395 ). Justin, you will be receiving 5,000 more HD embeds.

The runner-up is Dan McHugh for his film, "In The Studio" ( vimeo.com/groups/weekendproject/videos/4572332 ). Dan will be receiving 100mb more upload space.

Thanks to everybody who participated!

We have just released a new and improved Messaging System. This includes updates to both personal messaging as well as comment tracking and aggregation. We hope this makes communication on Vimeo easier and more enjoyable.

The improvements are as follows:
- full archive of inbox/sent messages
- ability to (select all) and delete or mark messages as read
- message inbox search
- new lightbox for composing messages from any user's avatar (send a message while watching a video!)
- mark as spam
- improved interface/experience/performance
- full archive of comments activity/tracking (uploaded/appeared videos, forums, blogs, group videos, group files, channel shoutbox posts, and any reply to your comments throughout Vimeo).

Check it out here.

It's that time of the week again. The time where the week ends and we do great video projects! This weekend's project, "Independence" is based on the idea that tomorrow is Independence Day here in the old U. S. of A. But independence surely is not just an American idea, it's global.

Here's the rundown:
Make a video expressing and conveying what independence means to you. This could be a video describing a certain trial in your life that you overcame on your own, a story recounting the day you moved away from home, or even a video of how you and your friends celebrate independence. But really, independence means different things for everybody.

An Independence Mini-challenge:
For those who will be witnessing the grandeur and spectacle of fireworks this weekend, try making a creative video of what you see. A great example of an original fireworks video was made last year by Michael Brodner. Check it out here.

Make sure you add your videos to the Weekend Project Group.

The prize: The best Independence video will get you 250MB more upload space or 5,000 HD embeds (for Plus users). The runner up will receive 100MB more upload space or 1,000 HD embeds (for Plus users).

Your videos are due on Tuesday, July 7, 2009 by midnight (EST).

Have fun, be safe (with fireworks), and have a great weekend! We look forward to seeing what you guys create.


UPDATE:

Thanks for all the videos. It was great to see how some celebrated this past weekend, what independence means to them as an individual, and all of the great fireworks. You all did a terrific job with this weekend project!

We have some winners!
First place goes to Sasha Kalicki for his piece appropriately entitled "Independence". Sasha, you will be receiving 5,000 more HD embeds.

The runner-up (and winner of the fireworks mini-challenge) is Yanni Batsios for his piece "4th of July". Yanni will be receiving 100mb more upload space.

Thanks to everybody who participated!

Hi everyone,

The staff here at Vimeo is committed to making this website stick around for a long time. We want your videos to live here for years and years, so that you can relive moments from your life and re-watch your creative achievements. In order to make that possible, we have to keep a close eye on the costs of running the site, and make sure that we're not being irresponsible with our resources.

Since the very beginning, Vimeo has retained the original video files that you upload, and allowed you to grant people permission to download those files. We always take these original files and convert them so that they will play online and in the Vimeo player. We kept the original files for download because we wanted you to be able to save your video exactly the way it looked when it left your hard drive. This aspect of the service was not a huge burden on us when the site was younger, but we've had to take another look at what we are realistically capable of offering for years to come, while making sure the site stays on budget. Original file storage of every file for every user is a massive cost, and we have noticed that only a very small set of users actually ever download their own files. We want to keep original file storage around as a feature for people who use it, but we can't continue to do it for everybody.

Starting August 1st, basic accounts' original source files will be stored for one week from the upload date, after which they will be removed. Of course the converted Vimeo video will always be there in the Vimeo player, ready to be watched again and again, anywhere you choose to embed or share it. We will also still provide a download link so people can save the converted file to their computer (in MP4 format).

This new one-week policy applies to all basic accounts' videos uploaded from this point onwards. For videos that were uploaded before this blog post, those original files will be available until August 1st, to give you some time to download them if you need to. After August 1st, those files will also be removed.

For Plus users nothing will change: we're going to continue hosting your original video source files for both your existing videos and any new videos you upload. We appreciate your support, and we want to continue improving the Plus service, not limit it. If you choose not to renew your Plus service, we'll keep your original videos for one month past the end of your subscription to give you time to download your videos or decide if you want to renew. Additionally, if a basic user upgrades to Plus within the one week window after they upload a video, that original file will be kept as long as they are a Plus member.

Please understand that this is not a devious scheme to force you to upgrade to Plus. This was a hard decision to make, but we make these changes to ensure Vimeo's longevity so that you *can* use it for free. By making this choice, we keep ourselves in good shape to stick around and provide you with the absolute best video sharing experience in the universe!