I’ve had a Sony HC1 HDV camera for about two years now, and I love it, but unfortunately I haven’t quite had the horsepower to edit in high-definition until recently. The other half of the equation is that it hasn’t been until recently that there was a decent way to present HD video online in a friendly manner, other than posting a huge Quicktime video file.
Fortunately, Vimeo, Blip.tv and other video hosting sites the higher quality capabilities of the recent Flash video codec. YouTube also supports a higher-quality progressive stream these days, but still limits the resolution to less than 1280×720 aka 720p. We even began supporting HD on Cruxy, but that was only for downloadable content, not streamed.
Watch my HD video of whales off Cape Cod on Vimeo.com
On a related subject, one of the limitations we faced with streaming HD at Cruxy was that the throughput of Amazon’s S3 service, on which Cruxy.com is built, was not enough to provide a good experience for viewers. We’d need to add something like Akamai or Limelight on the front-end to ensure minimal buffering. The recent news that Amazon is launching a CDN service makes me quite excited about the possibilities of serving HD video progressively streamed directly from S3.
For now if you want to post HD video online, check out Vimeo’s HD Video FAQ, as I think its the best solution for now.
Also, make sure to check out the HD Video on channel on Vimeo for some truly beautiful and amazing online motion pictures.