I want to produce a book trailer video lasting about a minute, so I’ve purchased a 12 second 1080 HD stock clip and I’ll have to include some more content such as still images, headline text and other video content so that it lasts about a minute. Music is something I have mixed feelings about. The aim is to have the video on the site but also post it on Vimeo and YouTube etc.
I have never worked with video before on a website and I’m wondering if somebody more experienced has some ideas of the best way forward. I have Hype 2 that I have never used before but I understand the videos it exports are compatible across many browsers and I need everything to work efficiently with good quality in a responsive manner.
Another consideration is whether to host the video on my own site or from somewhere else. I have a reasonably powerful VPS that can probably handle a lot more traffic than I imagine but I’m expecting some pretty big traffic at certain times. The site itself is static html and there is no MySQL or other database. I often hear people talking about hosting videos on Vimeo but I wondered if CloudFlare would make more sense.
Any advice or suggestions would be welcome. The final product needs to high quality and work smoothly so I am prepared to spend some time on this.
Sorry to be so late getting back to you on this. The book “trailers” that I have seen are usually made in AfterEffects or Motion, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying to use Hype or another lightweight animation engine to do this.
As far as hosting goes, Vimeo Pro is a great investment (~$100/year) and lets you upload one file, one format, and never worry about cross-browser or -version playback vagaries at all. If you want to spend way less,
CloudFlare is not exactly analogous, but it can be used to wrap around your Freeway-generated page (all you do is make a DNS change, basically) and they will take the brunt of your traffic for you. But then you are in the business of testing your video across a wide range of playback devices and versions.
When you use Vimeo (or YouTube) you are letting them take that pain for you, at the expense of either their branding appearing on screen, or some amount of money per year for a Pro account.
Thanks for your thoughts Walter. This is an area where I have very little experience, so I’ve basically made no progress since I originally posted. In the meanwhile I have concentrated on other areas instead but this is still something I need to address.
I actually tried the free version of CloudFlare a short while ago but found it was slightly slower than my own server. It would probably be a different story with a pro account but I know CloudFlare sometimes block legitimate traffic so I was thinking about MaxCDN as another alternative.
My VPS has an SSD with 5 gigs of Ram, which could handle a decent amount of traffic but there is no doubt that visitors from Australia or the US will have a slower loading site than somebody in Europe. This applies to the whole site though and not just the video, so there is a lot to consider because I am expecting quite a lot of traffic at certain times.
I just took a look at Vimeo Pro and it’s currently £159 for a year here in the UK, which would be steep for effectively hosting one short video but I’ll investigate some more. Recently I’ve seen lots of sites using Vimeo where the playback was slow and kept buffering but was fine when going through to the site of Vimeo. Presumably they were using a free version. YouTube with all their adverts and links back to YouTube is not really an option.
Regarding the production of the video I haven’t used Hype but I understand it automatically exports different sized videos in the correct formats that will be served up automatically depending on the user’s device. This is still something I need to sort out in terms of storyboard and can’t really begin until the book I am writing is finished.
The site itself is still in construction but fully responsive. After some serious consideration I actually decided to use Rapidweaver with Foundation, so I started with a blank canvass just like Freeway. There is a learning curve of course but I’m making quite good progress.
That has not been my experience. Did you use any sort of quantified performance testing, and did these tests include accessing the same file from different geographic locations? That’s where a CDN comes into its own.
From your Mac, it’s almost never going to make a measurable difference, unless your server is in one country and you are in another, and there is a CDN end-point that is physically nearer to you than the actual server.
Also, in order for a cache to actually work, it has to be “warmed up” by a prior request for that content. So the only time you would see a benefit was after the various geographic caches had been warmed up by a prior request. First person takes the brunt of the thing, as the file is requested, the cache “fails through” to the original, the original is loaded into the cache, and then the cache serves the file.
Walter
On Feb 6, 2015, at 11:09 AM, Ashley email@hidden wrote:
I actually tried the free version of CloudFlare a short while ago but found it was slightly slower than my own server. It would probably be a different story with a pro account but I know CloudFlare sometimes block legitimate traffic so I was thinking about MaxCDN as another alternative.
I am down in Cornwall and the server is somewhere near London. When I checked it direct from my own browsers a few times it was clearly faster without the CDN but remember I was testing the free package of CloudFlare, which isn’t their fastest offering.
When I tried it from other locations around the world via a website that timed page loading there seemed to be nothing in it at standard settings. Europe is never really an issue for speed but the US was slower and by the time it reaches Australia it was shifting from 2 seconds to almost 8 seconds. I read recently that Amazon reckoned every 100 milliseconds of speed gain adds 1% to their profits.
After fiddling with the optimisation settings I did see a small improvement, however when I tried to optimise further something ended up completely wrecking the formatting, so I started to wonder if that might have happened in other browsers before reaching that point. The last thing I need is visitors arriving to see a garbled mess.
Having the site running through a CDN wasn’t urgent, so I decided to disable it until I could find out more. I didn’t know about the “warm up” phase but that makes sense and it’s definitely something I will look at more carefully.
Having looked at Vimeo Plus it looks like a fairly good solution rather than uploading videos myself at various different sizes and formats. With a CDN handling static html files and Vimeo feeding the video I should be able to handle huge amounts of traffic but I know there will be newsletters going out to several hundred thousand people in addition to other marketing, so it does require a bit of planning up front. I was actually going to test it via a site called load impact.
In the past I’ve had newsletters go out to say 20,000 people but found there were never more than 50 people on the site at any one moment, though this was less targeted. At the time I had a much lower spec VPS with just 1 gig of ram but when I looked at the server status it wasn’t even breaking a sweat, despite having a video hosted on the same server. That was a Freeway site though that wasn’t responsive or dealing with retina images.
This is one of those areas where you just want to make sure everything is running 100% perfectly during the busy time because an hour of downtime at the wrong moment could be far more expensive than a year of hosting expenses. It’s good learn about these things advance.
I am sure it will vary from case to case and probably the chosen settings. My VPS is pretty fast, especially after making a few modifications, so I’d be surprised if I saw an improvement inside the UK using CloudFlare. Around the rest of the world it was fairly similar but perhaps I needed to leave it in place for longer
The only problems I’ve seen are the very infrequent and brief offline message. Usually a browser refresh will correct it. Other than that I’ve been very satisfied, especially for the free version.
Thanks Todd, I shall look at it again. Most likely I’ll pay the $20 per month for the pro version during the busy period and then possibly go back to the free version after the initial rush is over.