11 things I love about VimeoPro

I am surprised how many video professionals I meet who aren’t aware of Vimeo Pro, the US$199/year service.

In case it wasn’t completely clear in the title, I really love the US$199/year Vimeo Pro to distribute video for the web, mobile devices, and even for Internet connected HDTV sets. I am quite surprised to find so many video professionals in multiple countries who are completely unaware of the Pro version of the Vimeo service, which exists since August 2011 and includes many unique features not available with the free or Plus versions of Vimeo. Ahead in this article, you’ll find 11 things I love about Vimeo Pro, as a prelude to the upcoming article called Vimeo Pro’s few but glaring deficiencies as of November 2012. But first you’ll hear the good stuff that make me love it so much.

Some others who use Vimeo Pro

Apart from myself and some other Pro Video Coalition writers who use Vimeo Pro, I have also observed that LaCasaAusente.com, Philip Bloom, Diego Pocoví, and Memo Sauceda use it too, although of those, so far only Philip Bloom and I are using the logo feature. The others listed are clients and friends.

Eleven things I love about Vimeo Pro

1 — Quality
I honestly don’t see any visible degradation from the (purposefully heavy) H.264 files I upload and the multiple files that Vimeo Pro automatically creates for me, at several sizes. Here’s an example:

2 — Simplicity
I upload the largest file I have (up to 1080p) and Vimeo Pro does the rest for me. Generally, I set them for private with my logo in the player, deactivate many of the other buttons, set the permissible URLs for the video (covered ahead in this article), copy the embed code at the desired dimensions, and paste it onto the website where I want it embedded. In fact, those are part of a preset I use. Some software editing programs even have direct encoding/uploading to Vimeo Pro (although not specifically mentioned as Pro, it works with Pro accounts), including Final Cut Pro X. In fact, the 2011 video you saw above went directly from FCP X to Vimeo Pro. In other words, it was encoded in the Pix recorder as ProRes422(HQ), imported as such into FCP X, trimmed, and uploaded to Vimeo Pro. (Behind the curtains, FCP X encoded it to a very heavy H.264 at 1920x1080 at approximately 20 Megabits/second in two passes, knowing that Vimeo Pro would re-encode it in the same size and in smaller sizes up on the server.) read more...