Screenflow to Vimeo HD Settings

by kyle jones on November 19th, 2009

I do my screencasting in ScreenFlow and then upload my work to Vimeo, but silly ScreenFlow never seems to remember my export settings (and neither do I) so consider this as a reminder to myself as much as it is a knol for the hive mind.

So here’s what I do:

If at all possible, make sure your screen is set to 16:9 screen resolution. Vimeo likes a 1280×720 resolution for HD and because of this when I’m screencasting a browser I use a javascript bookmarklet to resize the window to that resolution: javascript:void(window.resizeTo(1280,720))
Capture per usual with ScreenFlow (SF) (note that if you use Mousepose’ 3 for effects you may get some weird zooming characteristics)
Use your resize options in SF to make sure the canvas is set on the front window and sized to 1280×720
Here are my export settings:
- SF Settings-
  - Scale by 100%
  - Use motion blur if you set some internal animations with SF
- Video-
  - Compression: H.264
  - Quality: high
  - Frame Rate: Current
  - Key Frame: 30
  - Bitrate: 5000 kbs
  - Frame Reordering: yes
  - Encoding Mode: Multi-pass (will provide greater quality, but will be slower)
  - Dimensions: 1280×720
  - Also, I always choose optimized for streaming
- Sound-
  - Format: AAC
  - Sample Rate: 44.100 khz
  - Channels: stereo
  - Bit Rate: 128 kbs
- Prepare for Internet Streaming-
  - Fast Start

When my videos do come up as HD in Vimeo they look perfect, but when not they are a bit fuzzy.

Always willing to hear comments and criticisms!

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5 Comments →

Marco Tassinari permalink

Are you sure about “fast start”, “optimize for streaming” and “frame reordering”? Others says to leave Vimeo doing this part of the conversion of the videos.

Tnx!
Marco
kyle jones permalink

@Marco

Thanks for stopping by. Good call on the frame reordering – I’ll fix that up. I’ve never seen anything about fast start settings at Vimeo. [EDIT- Lynn from Screenflow clarifies the purposes of Fast Start below (KJ, 12/3/09)]

I’m sure there are a few tweaks I could make past what I’ve written, but the file comes out in HD and looks pretty darn good so I don’t bother a whole lot.

~k~
Lynn permalink

HI Kyle,
Thank you for the helpful post.

To clarify, the choices under “Prepare for internet Streaming” are:
Fast Start, Fast Start – Compressed Header or Hinted Streaming

Fast Start: Allows your movie to begin playing before the movie has finished downloading. This is the most common option to use.

Fast Start – Compressed Header
Is the same as the Fast Start option, but compresses the header of the file.
Some older versions of QuickTime do not support this option, and therefore some users may not be able to view this format.

Hinted Streaming
Use this option if the video will be hosted on a QuickTime Streaming Server (QTSS). This option adds “hint tracks” which allow QTSS to stream the movie.

So for your purposes with Vimeo, it looks like Fast Start is the right choice.
kyle jones permalink

@Lynn

Thanks – I noticed I misread/misinterpreted Fast Start with Optimized for Streaming for some odd reason.
I edited the comment to refer to your own.

~Kyle~