Review of Vimeo: Free Online Video Hosting

If you ask where my highest number of online videos are, the answer is YouTube. If you then ask what you can do to enhance the quality of your videos at YouTube, or resolve conversion issues it has with Photo Story 3 wmv files, I’ll share what I do about them at YouTube, but also mention another free online host service - vimeo.

I fear that sharing the link to www.vimeo.com will add pressure on them to handle more uploads and possibly, maybe not today, become so successful that they’ll also need to scale back the service. The website and those who run it have all the hallmarks of high quality.

Vimeo doesn’t have a 10 minute maximum duration limit like YouTube… nor a low quality filter. It has a limit of 500 MB per user per week and supports high definition sized videos. It also lets viewers, with the owners permission, download a copy of the originally uploaded file, saving you having to convert flash files to the ones you need for your editing software.

Vimeo is perfectly suited for Photo Story. Take a single still picture from your 5, 7, or 10 megapixel digicam, make a story from it, and upload it to vimeo.

Photo Story 3 is a wonderful free software app from Microsoft. Its specialty is doing the great pans and zooms of a high quality still picture, like many of the scenes of a Ken Burns special. With Photo Story 3 it’s easy to make a better looking high definition sized video from your still pictures. The video files produced are wmv type files that can be uploaded directly to vimeo or used as source files for a movie project. I like to mix story and video clips in my movie projects.

Vimeo has lots of features, one of them being channels… if you’re a user of Photo Story 3, check the videos at the www.vimeo.com/PhotoStoryMagic channel, and join us.