YouTube just announced that they will support full 1080p next week. Smugmug has supported 1080p for awhile, but only for pro accounts.

Will Vimeo be expanding beyond 720p?

Errr, thanks Soxiam....but it does look like Smugmug (supporting 1080p for a year or two) and YouTube have "worked out the technical dependencies"!

Quoting Electronista: "As resolution of consumer cameras increases, we want to make sure YouTube is the best home on the web to showcase your content," said YouTube software engineer Billy Biggs on the company's blog.

"Best home on the web to showcase your content"....out of context, that's a line I would've expected to hear from Vimeo....not YouTube.

I don't know, but my 2-core, 1.9ghz, 2g RAM Vaio played their 1080p Orchid video very smoothly with no pauses. Looked kinda' good too.

But that's not why I like Vimeo. I come here because of the content and the community. Not to mention all I learn around here.

Was able to get 2 1080p videos uploaded and then it no longer worked.

vimeo.com/6115774

Youtube has taken them without issue once I found Vimeo would not.

You all forget that a lot of people have 1080p TVs now with them hooked up to set-top media streamers, video game consoles, mini computers, "nettop" computers, etc that are all capable of doing 1080p on the super cheap (and are only getting cheaper).

For a company that prides itself on being progressive & catering to an upper tiered user base, you sure dont carry that over in the technical aspect of your business. You guys just now got 30fps for HD & thats been around FOREVER on other sites. I imagine 1080p will be the same with Vimeo & you'll implement it when its old news while still charging a premium price.

Just saying, I think whenever these subjects come up here, a lot of Vimeo fanboys come outta the woodwork defending decisions like this. Are you guys really saying you wouldnt like Vimeo to be able to display your 1080p content (that many of your cameras are capable of shooting in) for those viewers who are able to see it? I mean, on what planet does that logic make sense?? Especially when you're paying for the service.

BTW, here's Smugmug's 1080p (which they've had for over a year now) & nothing about this looks of low quality like a poster above said: cmac.smugmug.com/gallery/6677452_e9rL5#427227023_AsXNo-X2-LB

I have a pro account on Smugmug. Their 1080p looks really good, however they basically have a working player and thats about it. You can only play HD on a smugmug site, embedding on other sites is standard definition only. Also, 1080p is for pro accounts only (150 per year), so the privilege is not cheap. Smugmug has no customizing options for embeds at all, in stark contrast to the complete control that Vimeo plus offers. In fact, I just recently upgraded to Vimeo plus for that very reason!

The Smugmug Full HD player is fairly useless as far as I can see. My reasonably up to date laptop screen only shows about one quarter of the actual picture. What is the point of that? The Vimeo 720p player has the huge advantage of actually working properly.

Though I am a bit skeptical about just how good or well 1080p will playback, it seems to me (with all due love and respect) that the disappointment here is that Vimeo is now the follower instead of the leader. Offering HD when all the rest were saying essentially what Vimeo is saying now, we don't support HD because we don't believe most people can play it back. That's pretty much exactly what YouTube said for years while we were all loving Vimeo and shaking our heads at other services. I still loath YouTube but have to give props for them for jumping in with both feet once they embraced HD and do wish Vimeo would continue to lead other sites instead of following. We see that with mobile support that I've been able to get on my HTC with YouTube for how long before Vimeo has begun to try and support at least the iPhone and now with 1080p. I don't plan on going anywhere but would always rather be pushing the boundaries of possibility, not just accepting perceived limitations as an excuse.

- Ray

I have to say - I'm shocked by the response by Vimeo staff regarding the resolution arms race. I agree with many of the presented sentiments about Vimeo essentially turning a blind eye to paying customers.

While this would have been understandable back when Vimeo was solidly a pro bono service (and provided a *fantastic* pro bono service), when I'm paying $60 a year I expect a technical superiority to match my dollar versus the free service across the digital divide. I understand that there are technical limitations in place - hell I've been eternally impressed by the 1280x720 capabilities that run on pretty much any machine - but to say that there are no plans since "most users" are incapable is ridiculous.

Obviously "most users" are not going to pay $60 for a service that doesn't match up to a competing free site either. Vimeo has long supported the professional community as well as the prosumer who wants the best showcase for their art. The community here is second to none, but as of next week I'll be strongly considering where to maintain my primary video archive.

Please consider tailoring your service to paying customers if nothing else.

THANK YOU, Andrew, for bringing back the sound of the Vimeo I originally joined (ie., trying to push the limits for people that want very high quality - while recognizing *valid* limitations - rather than being annoyed with paying customers!).

Your test video played great for me. No stutters, no pauses while playing full screen...and I'm on the world's worst WIFI right now (gotta install that replacement router!). fwiw, I'm on one of our 17" MacBook Pro's.

I don't have any videos on Vimeo at 1080p - I've always converted to 720p and then uploaded.

btw, Andrew, I'm still chuckling at your comment that "From a pure math perspective, it doesn't add up"

Anyone remember Compuserve? They couldn't handle high-speed 2400-baud modems when they first came out! When Eric Bina wrote a graphical interface for the internet lots of folks began wringing their hands at the idea of the great unwashed clogging up the internet by downloading bitmapped pictures.

So, your challenges as a company are to (1) continue adapting to rapid technology changes while (2) deciding whether to adapt by leading (and growing) your customer base, or to watch as we follow technology and look back on Vimeo as "that early HD effort".

Andrew is right. Increasing frame size without increasing bitrate will only produce more macroblocking, not real detail. 720p is good enough for online video, heck, it is good enough for broadcast. I can share some frame grabs from 1080i 16Mbit/s MPEG-2 broadcast with horrible macroblocking. This is a numbers game, and consumers always think bigger is better, like 1080i is better than 720p. Granted, YT is offering 1080p, but at what frame rate? I'd rather see 720p60 than 1080p24.

In regards to YT viewers using their TVs. I just bought the Panasonic BD-80 Blu-ray player, it can feed clips from YouTube. Netflix also has a set-top box. Without making arrangements with manufacturers like DivX did with DVD player manufacturers, Vimeo will remain a niche, online-only service.

"less than 10% of people who even visit Vimeo have monitors capable of displaying 1080p resolution, where as over 80% are capable of 720p"

Andrew, I dont understand this statement. Does it mean that less than 10% of visitors have monitors that have resolutions of at least 1080 pixels??

If so, I wouldnt think that would matter since Vimeo squeezes the video player frame into a set size & then can scale up when going fullscreen. Wouldnt 1080p on Vimeo just be more resolution (aka: sharper image) packed down into the same HD player, regardless of the viewer's screen resolution??

I would think the main issue would be, how many visitors have the CPU power to play 1080p flash videos. And there's probably no way to determine that based on statistics from visitor analysis since that info isn't included.

Having looked at the 1080p Disney Park video there is just no difference between that and regular Vimeo HD. You could run it at 720p, save on the upload and the dl time and it would still look good.

Something significant to consider regarding saving time: the single biggest frustration I have with workflow is the time to change a movie shot in 1080 down to 720 for Vimeo. A 15 minute band halftime show takes 6-8 hours to convert, using a 2.33 Ghz Core 2 duo MacBook Pro. I spent an hour at an apple store a couple weeks ago, and we confirmed that even on the newest machines it takes forever. BUT....telling iMovie to keep the native 1080 instead of changing to 720 and it flies right along.

So, right now I watch my raw footage on my big screen tv at 1080, and spend 6-8 hours of computer time to downsize it for Vimeo to share with band families. (I often hit the file size limit with 720, so uploading a larger video won't work until Vimeo supports larger files....which is hand in hand with 1080).

Yes, I could probably just shoot in 720 to avoid the conversion, but then I would be letting Vimeo's technical limitations dictate that I not use my camcorder, TV (and computers) to their best capabilities. Not gonna happen.

I've been using 5mbit/s (sometimes 4 to fit!) per the Vimeo guidelines. That may also be a legacy of needing to fit under 1GB (and if I recall, I think the limit was initially 500MB). Certainly my quality would go up if I could go higher (iMovie wants to use 10, I think, if you just click the HD option; I have to specify custom settings to reduce the quality/size to fit Vimeo)

I only learned about Desktop Uploader a couple days ago, but as recounted on another thread it allows a 2.15GB file to upload completely...and then changes the status to "failed" and disappears.

Based on the Apple Store geeks helping me out, it doesn't appear that data rate is the issue....it's changing from 1080 to 720 that takes forever and a day.

i think its irrelevant online, I like vimeo over you tube personally. All I've had with you tube in the past is trouble!

I think the biggest deal with the YouTube announcement (at least for myself personally) was that they were willing to retranscode user videos which had been uploaded at 1080P originally. I have historically uploaded 720P reconverted videos to Vimeo since it was always recommended to do the resolution conversion at the source rather than through Vimeo's automated system.

Since I have also shot on the D90 over the last 6 months, this hasn't bothered me - the camera res and the Vimeo res match perfectly. However, as of this week my workflow will switch to the 7D, and 1080P will become my new standard of transmission.

If I could be assured that I could upload a 1080P file and have it convert via the automator without losing perceptual quality (and thereby retain the 1080 file on the server for download and later transcode) then that would be a stopgap for any alternative service. I just want to be sure that the files I upload today will look just as good in 2 years, without compromising quality at either end of the time frame.

Perhaps if the Vimeo Uploader offers an option to use different files for web playback and user download? Upload a 720P file for transcode and playback, then the original 1080P file for archive and download. There would be additional upload time required, but users like me who use Vimeo as a testing and critique system during production would be happy as collective clams.

From the community guidelines:

"It is also best to export 1920x1080 or 1440x1080 video as 1280x720 too, since we will automatically scale it down."

Perhaps I read too far into this - I was under the impression that transcoding via Vimeo would incur a greater perceptual penalty than transcoding via an NLE with specialized options. As you pointed out, a 1080P file, scaled via flash, has image degradation at smaller player sizes relative to the page...

Am I way off base?

This is all getting a little bit strange... there's a lot of talking here, but not much conclusive statements about what we are talking about... The 1080p videos on all online systems I've seen so far are NOT better than the 720p solutions - as stated before they are just compressed at the same bitrate, so they have to make longer GOPs, lesser detailed macroblocks, etc... but since no one actually has any data about the true performance (that is TRUE vertical resolution and also detail and sharpness of moving objects - and at least in video and film where you have mostly moving objects this is a much more important issue,) of each system (including 720p), this conversation is more on a "bar level" (we are all very subjective - including me, and human psyche is not really the best observer, when it expects to see something)... but I think this subject could be interesting for additional explorations, so I might do a real performance test of each solution in the near future (because I luckily do such stuff for the slovenian biggest IT magazine)...

I'd love to see objective, unbiased, tests by you or someone, Marko! There is certainly the possibility that 1080p is the video version of megapixel wars in DSLRs. I was ready to buy Canon's 7D (which supports full 1080p video, and got me thinking more about 1080 v 720 at Vimeo) until I read several reviews that showed the image quality is worse than my 40D and several other Canons. Despite great new features, cramming 18megapixels onto an APS-C sensor got great marketing press, but screwed the images.

After a brief knee-jerk hesitancy, Vimeo seems to be willing to evaluate 1080p. It may or may not make sense to provide it, but it does make sense to evaluate it honestly when at least two competitors offer it.

YouTube is virtually impossible to contact and ask questions (might be different for the press), but Smugmug is very accessible with a very dynamic forum at digitalgrin.com. They are proud of their 1080p and would likely share their reasons with you, though they haven't really focused on video anything like they have with photos (even for pro accounts, much of their video offering is stale, and for basic and power accounts it's downright annoying).

Please keep us posted with your performance tests and results!!

ps - to a consumer, part of the confusion is probably that full 1080p looks so astonishing on big screen tvs with Blu Ray, that we think "1080p" more than we think "computers aren't TVs".

i enjoy denis.

when i put in 60 dollars for a plus account, i expected that vimeo would be the innovative little company that stood up to the big giant youtube. vimeo should be the one that listens to its users for new features and it should be the one that goes ahead and implements all kinds of crazy ideas. and yet here we see youtube consistently being ahead of vimeo, despite being free. i paid so my videos would be converted right away, but that hasn't happened in a while. every time i finish uploading, it tells me my videos will be converted in a moment, but that moment often becomes 5 to 10 minutes. anyway, vimeo, your initial moments of glory are gone now, and you must work hard and fight to stay in the game.

Geez...with all the confusion over bitrate, progressive, interlacing, etc...now we add "hyperbole" to the mix. Let's face it....that's a really confusing word. "Extravagant exaggeration" some say. Well, what would be the point of an exaggeration that wasn't? Even the pronunciation is odd....oft confused with the classic, and recently reinvented hyperbowl. The mind spins.

Focus, everyone....let's focus!

This is the mandatory conversation that was bound to come up for every video host that doesn't immediately jump on the 1080p bandwagon.

I decided to do a full comparison of Apple Quicktime 1080p and Youtube 1080p.

You can read it here: bit.ly/5S88Tf

Short of it is, Youtube 1080p streams HD to peoples homes that is 1920x1080p, but in terms of detail, it in many ways doesn't even match Apple QT 720p.

And for all of us who know how much is lost in Apple QT, this is simply unacceptable quality loss.

To the Vimeo Staff - please just find a better quality delivery system than the one Youtube adopted before you go implementing 1080p.

Just watched some SmugMug 1080p. Looks great, but at 7337k/sec , more than double Youtube's 3471k/sec, I would expect it would look better, and its not going to stream without pausing to buffer on anything but the beefiest of connections. 1080p streaming just ain't here yet folks.

Trevor, excellent blog. I just retweeted it. I really like the visual comparison.

Does anyone else find 1080p a bit jarring on the web? It almost seems too sharp, perhaps surreal. Maybe I'm getting old, but unless something is shot by a professional, I'd prefer not to see the gritty details of their footage. I'd be particularly happy not to see their camera shake in HD.

Thank you for saying so Ariane! I did it for real vid tech people like us who want to see whats really going on behind the curtain.

1080p by people who know how to shoot video is great. 1080p by amatuers who don't know basic videography is like 480p by the same people only 7 times as bad.

Tripods, people, tripods!

I think I must recommend a tripod in every single blog post. My "great fanbase" (haha) must be sick of it. So I started suggesting creative tripod alternatives. Stack of books. Silly putty. Someone's back when their bent over. Anything, just steady that darn camera! Has anyone tried the monsterpod on photojojo? I'm curious if it works with camcorders.

My full HD (1920 x 1080) videos are in my archive of raw videos. One day I would like to have an internet (private/locked) archive of uncompressed raw videos. Till then, it is great to be Vimeo user ;)

Andrew's math seems solid, and what I would also have intuitively expected. This is a bit of a marketing stunt that will lose money in the short term - like the rest of YouTube.

But a Google yields ow.ly/GPKq where Gizmodo (who?) would disagree.

Any thoughts on this..?

Hi Karel, and thank you for the comment on my blog post.

My thoughts on your comment above are simple - that Gizmodo comparison is worthless, it directly flies in the face of my comparison.

In their comparison - they say "You will see that the 1080p version is clearly sharper than the 720p, helped by the extra pixels." Duh. YT's 720p is terrible. What I did was to compare YT 1080p to Apple QT 1080p, and even 720p and what I came up with was that Apple 720p held more detail, and in some cases, significantly more, than YT 1080p. And Apple QT is not exactly the best codec in the world to compress with, but nevertheless it doesn't fall apart like YT's video does.

Hmmm. youtube.com/watch?v=yQ5U8suTUw0
this trailer for the Dark Knight is awesome. 1080p is awesome. I love the layout of Vimeo...but 1080p is hard to resist.

The eye only resolves a given amount of pixels for a given viewing distance. To actually be able to see the difference between 720p and 1080p you need to have a display device cable of resolving it (i.e. a monitor with a 1920 or greater horizontal resolution) a sufficiently large physical screen size and be sat sufficiently close to it.

I haven't looked into the maths for computer screens but for normal viewing distances for a home TV setup (viewer sat approximately 2m from the screen) the screen has to be at least 40" or larger before the eye can actually resolve any diifference between 720p and 1080p.

There are plently of formally conducted blind tests that confirm this.

The bottom line is resolution is not everything. To my mind YouTube 1080 is just a marketing ploy. Does anyone know whether they have actually increased the data rate for the stream? This is the only thing that will actually icrease the image quality.

As a final thought the BBC series Planet Earth was predominantly shot on Panasonic Varicam a 720p format. I've heard many people comment on this series but nobody said "ooh, it's a bit lacking in resolution"

i just uploaded a vid to vimeo in 1080.. does that mean it was compressed to 720 after processing?

vimeo to add 1080 support by end of month - -

news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10427282-2.html

they could have left this little bit off:

"While the move to 1080p is big for Vimeo (literally), it's a few months behind video juggernaut YouTube, which introduced the feature in November. And unlike Vimeo, YouTube offers both mobile viewing and 1080p playback to all its users without requiring a paid subscription service."

This is great news! I have started to make short videos at 1080p with MS Flight Simulator in combination with enhanced scenery add-ons.
vimeo.com/8659180
I was disappointed when I had to re-render at 720 before uploading because the crispness factor for this type of video is lost at the lower resolution.