Drama in the sky – Time Lapse from Paul Klinger on Vimeo – You can’t embed the HD Version here so you’ll have to click the HD button and go the the Vimeo site.

Vimeo offers its HD service in 720p. Sure its not 1080, but how many people can handle 1920×1080 on their home computers? I would say at this point its still the minority. So 720p does the job and is a nice jump up from the 480 stuff that we are used to.

Vimeo is using On6VP flash for video playback on its site. much like YouTube is doing. YouTube however also offers an h.264 version. (mp4 version) You can add &fmt=18 at the end of any YouTube URL and it will play you the higher quality h.264 version. (stereo audio too) This is how you are able to watch YouTube clips on many devices like the PS3. There is talk on a couple of the Vimeo forums about the possibility of moving to an h.264 format in the future especially when Flash 9 gets a full roll-out as it will natively support playback of h.264 video. The problem with this is that playing an h.264 720p streaming video over a browser on an older machine is probably not going to go well. So Flash for now is the best course.

Once you have uploaded your 720p video, Vimeo keeps the original resolution of 1280×720. During playback you can press the full screen button. Once in full screen mode, on the right there is a toggle for scaling. Which is nice because scaling up from 720p on a hi res monitor looks less than acceptable. Turning scaling off lets you watch the 720p video in its true resolution of 1280×720.

Overall… It’s a nice service. Would love to see some church’s start to stream their webcasts in 720p too.

Technorati Tags: Vimeo, 720p, H.264, YouTube, On6VP, HD

Let me first start off and say I think its great that Final Cut Studio 2 supports the AVCHD codec and I’m so glad that they integrated the ability to use cameras that use that codec with Final Cut.  However my problem is that Final Cut actually transcodes the h.264 based codec of AVCHD to Apple ProRes 422.  This is great in one way because ovbiously Final Cut deals with ProRes 422 natively, so this way you can easily bring your clips in and edit them in real-time do everything you want to do. But the downside is that ProRes 422 is about 4 times the size of the original AVCHD video files.  So for example, a 2-minute native AVCHD file is about 200 MB. After transcoding to the Apple ProRes 422 codec, the file size can be as large as 2 GB.

Ok so that’s my rant for today.  When your shooting on your consumer grade HD camera you can get lots of footage on that 8GB flash drive.  But watch out when you start to ingest that stuff into Final Cut.  Your gonna need lots of space.

Basically my workaround for this is to export my final video as an h.264 MOV or MP4.  Quality will be good and you’ll save on file size. If your trying to basically keep everything you recorded onto a SD card or something.  Just copy the entire contents of the card to a folder on your drive.  Then you can keep it for later when you want to pull clips into FCP.  Another great app to check out for fast H.264 encoding is Visualhub.  But I’ll save going over all the deatils on that app for another day.

Technorati Tags: AVCHD, Final Cut Studio 2, H.264, VisualHub