So I’ve been playing around with compression schemes this week after noticing how washed out the color was in 301 — in the original footage it’s vibrant and on Vimeo it’s almost monochrome in some sections.  After reading up a bit on how H264 handles color I ran some tests with our trailer:


Check that out. The bottom right is the original, the bottom left is the copy which is on Vimeo right now, the top right is a version of it compressed to 720p (instead of 1080p) and the top left is 720p at a higher bitrate. Going from 1080p to 720p at the same settings produced a video which a.) looks identical (and crappy) and b.) is actually a larger file size. That makes no sense.

Doesn’t matter though, as clearly the 720p at a higher bitrate (top left) is our winner for today. The files will be a bit bigger but they should stream exactly the same way on Vimeo. Now to try replacing 301 with that!