YouTube vs Vimeo for the Chris d'Lacey mini-doc

If you follow this blog, you may remember the day a month or so ago when I had the pleasure of shooting Chris d'Lacey, the bestselling children's author. Shot in the movie sense. I then edited the piece into a 5 minute mini-doc, of Chris talking about his dragon books, and particularly the latest, Dark Fire.

The original target for the film was a conference put on by the publisher, but once we had the thing made and saw it, it became clear that it might be of interest to Chris's many fans around the world. So... I had to take my first steps into the world of Internet broadcasting.

Which platform to choose? My contact with YouTube has been good so far. It has been the place to go for tutorials and odd clips of famous moments that I wanted to see. Having said that, I was often put off by poor sound to image synchronization. Vimeo, I first came across through Chris Jones's excellent film making blog. (If you are anything to do with indi film making, following this is a MUST). Whenever CJ is at film festivals or doing anything particularly visual, he tends to put up a video blog entry - which is Vimeo hosted. If a film maker like him chooses Vimeo, it makes it well worth looking at.

Both platforms have increased quality recently with the addition of an HD option. The difference being that with YouTube you can embed their HD broadcasts in other web pages, but with Vimeo embedded video has to be in a lower quality. On that count YouTube scores higher.

However, in Vimeo I have discovered a wonderful resource of films about film making. And a community of film makers. As the platform that first offered high better quality, it seems to have attracted a following of people like CJ and others.

Here is the Vimeo version.


Dark Fire from Rod Duncan on Vimeo.

And here is YouTube...



But for a fairer comparison, you need to navigate away from these pages view the film on Vimeo and YouTube. That way you can access the higher quality mode that Vimeo offers.

I still haven't completely got to grips with the best file format and best rendering settings to export from my video editor to these platforms. The movement isn't smooth yet. I suspect I can tweak it to make that better. We will see. I have a lot to learn.


Note: Having published this blog entry, I now see that - through my browser, at least, the YouTube embedded image gobbles up part of the blog page where it should not be.