Killionaire Video Test

Playing Halo on Friday and I managed to get a Killionaire. Woo hoo. So to celebrate I’d though it was time to take a video and test not only the Panasonic TZ5’s video performance but also to try out the different online video hosts to see which works out best. The video is of me laying waste with the gravity hammer in Halo. The video was shot in 720p mode using the TZ5. Some shady rawk music was added to increase authenticity.

Ideally I’d like to upload and show the video in HD. For that I’ll be trying Vimeo and Viddler. I’ll also throw the video onto Flickr, Youtube and .Mac website. First up is Vimeo.

Killionaire from Ian D on Vimeo.

The first realisation is that upload speeds really have to pick up as uploading 120Mb HD films is very time consuming. 120Mb is probably over the top for what this video is but it’s more of a test than anything else. Vimeo has a nice easy to use interface and once the video is uploaded it converts it into flash. The quality is very good (well I thought so) and you can also view it full screen. There is also a link to the original video so you can download it if you really wanted to. Currently there is a limit of 500MB of uploads per week.

Next up is Viddler.

This is very similar to Vimeo in that once uploaded the video is then processed into Flash. However there are some features that are unique to Viddler. You can add tags to the video timeline to highlight sections in your video. Users can also add comments to the timeline which makes for a more interactive experience. The encoded flash video isn’t as good quality as Vimeo’s though. Noticably poorer from the same source. Like Vimeo you can download the original .mov video.

Third video is via Flickr.

Video is a recent addition to Flickr and it has one major limitation. Video’s can only have a maximum length of 90 secs. This sounds a bit of a show stopper but I think it’s great. Keeps video’s short and focussed. Flickr doesn’t support HD at the moment and the encoded video is of poorer quality compared to Vimeo. You also can’t access the original video via Flickr.

Onto the biggie – Youtube.

Uploading was annoying as there was no indication of progress or how long there was to go. The options felt very limited compared to Vimeo and Viddler. Quality is…well, the usual for Youtube. Not very impressive really.

Finally, publishing to a .Mac gallery. No options to embed back to here and on the gallery you see the full 125Mb video. If you really wan to waste some bandwidth, view it here. This was done via iPhoto and was very easy to do. The uploading took the longest out of all the options. It was so slow. Viewing options are also limited to viewing original with no comments or tagging. Pretty poor.

Verdict
Out of the five video options I tried I preferred Vimeo. It uploaded and processed my video quickly and the website itself is fast. The quality of the Flash video is also the best out of all the sites I tried today. If Vimeo wasn’t available then Flickr would be my next choice. The upload and processing was done quickly and there is a great community focus on Flickr already. Friends are used to viewing my pic’s through Flickr so why not video? Out of the others I would use Viddler next, then Youtube with .Mac bringing uo the rear.

Next time I have video’s to post I’ll certainly be using Vimeo. Hopefully they will be more interesting though!