How to present video to your clients

[Paddy Uglow]

You can make a Vimeo Album and send a link to that. If I remember, you have quite a bit of control over how the embedded album can look, if you’re embedding it on a web page.

Re Vimeo v YouTube, I always think Vimeo has more of a kind of “film-maker” reputation rather than the “anything goes” of YouTube. But I find YouTube’s interface lots easier to work with; it took me a while to work out that you have to save each Vimeo tab separately when entering film details etc – YouTube auto-saves all your updates as you do them. And you can upload more videos at once on youtube.

Paddy, CreativeMedia.org.uk

[Willem Scholtes]

Wow, great tip!

And i agree with your Vimeo vs Youtube argument. Youtube does has more options, is more stable and uploading is way faster. But Youtube has a non professional vibe to it opposed to Vimeo.

[Walter Blazewicz]

Paddy’s response got it. Make an Album and you can have one link and one password.

[Bill Davis]

Just noting that my Vimeo experience has been very different from Todds. (Maybe it’s something about the state of the internet pipes in our various systems?) but I’ve almost never had any issues with our client Vimeo distributions. So it’s my “go to” platform when any file gets too big to use the direct SHARE-EMAIL-CLIENT path directly out of the FCP-X interface.

The fact share to Vimeo inside X is a single click process (as is share to YouTube) so convenience is probably a factor as well.

I do happily maintain a Vimeo Pro account, and see that $200 a year as far less than I used to pay for FedEx deliveries. And it’s SO much easier and more efficient.

Also, with Vimeo Pro you can strip out ALL the branding elements and put in your own if you’re an HTML jockey (I’m not and typically make my client Portfolios clean and simple) Vimeo Pro also lets you enable or disable client downloads and it’s internal “versioning” for full size and mobile versions works pretty flawlessly and means my deliveries are automatically platform and device agnostic.

Many ways to get to the same place, but I hardly ever use YouTube because Vimeo is all I seem to need.

I’d feel differently if I was using the service to feed public viewing since YouTube dominates in Search – . but for internal client communications, I think Vimeo Pro is a pretty great platform.

FWIW, and YMMV.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Bill Davis]

In the Vimeo Pro ecosystem, these are Portfolios.

Portfolios let you group and present collections of videos from your library on a single page. You can apply different portfolio looks from their templates, or you can do custom HTML surrounds. You can also choose to display or hide branding elements at will.

The important thing is that you can create as many Portfolios as you like. You can put a password firewall in front of a Portfolio or leave it publicly accessible.

Vimeo Pro work is by default “Private” which is to say that unlike the public Vimeo portal, nothing gets indexed by the web crawlers or auto-bots – so even your non-password protected stuff isn’t going to end up being searchable by the public unless you decide to make it public.

Also, Vimeo Pro has been flirting with “pay via click” and donation system type stuff for a while now – dipping their toes into the monetization puddle.. I don’t know where they’re going with that, but at some point, it’s conceivable that they could add “pay to watch” functions – which might be interesting in the long run.

Right now I just see it as a great client service system.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Mike Cohen]

We use one of the transfer file services, for client ease of use. Most people know to download the file, though most of the services let you view in the browser as well. I see the download count and some files are downloaded once, others 20-30 times by the same person.

In the corporate/hospital world, youtube type sites are sometimes blocked so a file sharing service is the best bet. We also have our own web server where we can setup custom pages with some boilerplate html code for showing videos via native h.264 playback or flash for older browsers.

We also use Basecamp with some clients.

Mike Cohen

[Todd Terry]

[Mike Cohen] “In the corporate/hospital world, youtube type sites are sometimes blocked”

Mike’s right… that hadn’t occurred to me. We don’t really use YouTube for clients but two of our biggest are a gigantic hospital group, and a large credit union. I now remember both of them saying that they couldn’t view YouTube videos because of internal settings there.

Also like Mike, in the distant past we also put files on our internal server here, and I wrote a custom html page to display the videos (at that time I did them with flv files). I honestly don’t know why we stopped doing that… I might revisit that idea.

T2

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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com