Austin Improv

What's the best site for uploading high quality video these days? I want something like Vimeo.com, but without the 500 meg a week upload limit. God willing, I want to put some of the OOB videos up this year. Google video's alright, but it always comes out small and a little too compressed. YouTube doesn't work, since they have a 100 meg upload limit.

http://www.viddler.com/ for streaming.

http://www.filedropper.com/ for just uploading the video for download

Cool, thanks. I'm also looking at Blip.TV. Anyone tried it?

Any other video uploading tools for large files that folks are using?

I've got a 1.8G HD file to upload and can't seem to find anything that will accommodate that for free.

I miss Google Video.

kristin wrote:Any other video uploading tools for large files that folks are using?

I've got a 1.8G HD file to upload and can't seem to find anything that will accommodate that for free.

I miss Google Video.

Are you just uploading it to stream? How long is it and how high is the quality? If you are just wanting it to be streamed you should really consider cutting down the resolution if it is HD quality.

YouTube has a 1GB upload limit; but it is limited to 10 minute clips. There is an encoder called "YAMB" which can split H.264 files into 10 minute chunks without recoding them, that's what I do for improv shows.

NoahV wrote:

kristin wrote:Any other video uploading tools for large files that folks are using?

I've got a 1.8G HD file to upload and can't seem to find anything that will accommodate that for free.

I miss Google Video.

Are you just uploading it to stream? How long is it and how high is the quality? If you are just wanting it to be streamed you should really consider cutting down the resolution if it is HD quality.

It's not the resolution, it's the bitrate.

The key determining factor in how BIG a video is is the bitrate - which is the number of bits per second the file has to store the information of the video.

When you're watching online video, you're not watching the original video - you're watching, essentially, an approximation of the original event. The higher the bitrate, the more "room" the video has to store more information, so the more accurate the approximation.

This has nothing to do with resolution, except in two ways:

First, some codecs (the format of the video) do better at approximating video at lower bitrates. For a codec like "MPEG2" (which you find on DVDs), you need a higher bitrate than "H.264" to show an equivalent "quality" video. So a 10mbps MPEG2 file and a 5mbps H.264 file look roughly equivilant.

Additionally, the higher the resolution (size in pixels) of the video, the more bitrate you need just to get the video looking passibly good without distractions (called artifacts). 640x480 standard definition video looks really good at 1.5mbps, but 1280x720 high definition video doesn't look that good.

I find that generally, using the H.264 codec, you can have SD video at 768kbps, 720p video at 4mbps, and 1080p video at 8mbps before the artifacting becomes distracting and unpleasant.