This week I finally arrived at the finishing post with some of my HD Video footage. Although I’ve been shooting pure HD for the past 18 months; processing it and rendering it has always been a heavy task.
Since the upgrade to Snow Leopard, Final Cut Express 4 seems to have come into it’s own and really does seem to run so much better. I could still benefit from a faster machine but the Macbook is coping and so HD delivery has now arrived. With the HD production line flowing, the final stage of the workflow was to get the movies uploaded and embedded in HD. I have evaluated 2 possible sources for this, Vimeo and YouTube.

Firstly Vimeo.

Now Vimeo definitely seems to like to promote itself as the ‘film makers’ site. They offer 2 kinds of membership – Basic and Plus. The Basic account is free and allows you to upload 1 HD Video per week. However, embedding the movie into your website in HD requires a Vimeo Plus account with a cost of $59.99 per annum. The uploaded film footage does look decent on the Vimeo site (check out this example) however, I wanted HD embedded on my site and I’m a bit reluctant to pay especially if I could get a similar service for free elsewhere.

So… Secondly onto YouTube HD.

YouTube have only recently started offering HD streaming so as with anything new you instantly become sceptical. My first upload conked out at 91% – oh dear I thought, that $60 fee for Vimeo suddenly became more acceptable. Anyway, i slept on it all and tried the HD upload to YouTube the next morning and it sailed up without a hitch.
Now unlike Vimeo, YouTube seems to take a while longer in post-processing your movie even after you’ve uploaded it. My advise would be to log off and leave it an hour after it’s successfully uploaded. My return 1 hour later – all the encoding had finished and I could not only watch but also embed my lovely HD movies straight into my website for no Fee at all. This is great I thought, there’s got to be a catch? Well… up to now I see no catch. There’s not even those tacky advert banners appearing at the end just a nice subtle ‘replay’ button. See for yourself over at our Video page HERE

So there we are. HD embedded Video streaming off someone else’s server, with no advertising and no cost at all. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me! I should point out… my Capture source was 960×540 so with some slight up scaling a bit of the sharpness is lost. Still, it’s a vast improvement on SD and DVD and again, for a free media channel it’s more than adequate for showcasing some soundtracks. After all, it is primarily about the Music