Stanford University Campus revisited
I re-cut my old Stanford video today (different clip arrangement, a few new scenes, new color grading) and re-uploaded it. Unfortunately, the HD version is unusable on my 3Ghz hyperthreaded P4 now because Vimeo upgraded their Flash HD re-encoding to 30fps from their previous 24fps cap. The HD video plays very choppy. If they don’t fix this somehow, I will have to leave Vimeo and go with Blip.TV. I have no plans to buy a new PC. SD version below:
Additionally, Vimeo removed the ability to get high quality re-encoding out of 480p video, it’s now 720p, 1080p or nothing. As of right now, uploading 1440×1080 won’t give you the high quality re-encoding either (I filed a bug report with them).
Update: Not even my husband’s 2.4 Ghz Core2Duo Macbook Pro can’t playback the 30fps HD Vimeo version perfectly smoothly (every few seconds there are jumps). This is a feature that Vimeo should lay off for 2 more years and send a letter to Adobe to sit their asses down to optimize Flash more (the Flash player is single-threaded). Yes, the latest version of Flash is faster than the previous ones, but my husband is not allowed to install such software on his Google laptop so he still runs an older version. Basically, to be able to playback very smoothly the new Vimeo HD 30fps videos, you need Core2Duo 2 Ghz and above with the newest Flash version installed. These are very steep requirements. The old 24fps cap videos were playing back fine on 3.5 year old PCs, now you need a 1.5 year old PC or newer.
Update 2: Dalas from Vimeo re-encoded the video, I think it’s back at 24fps now, not sure, but it’s smoother now. Hopefully, users will be able to select if they want a 24fps or 30fps re-encoding so I don’t have to ask them each time…