Staff Blog

Now that the Vimeo World Tour is over, we would like to make sure we continue to cultivate the Vimeo Meetup & Party culture in our amazing Community. Inspiring people to make awesome videos and interact off-line, in real life, is one of the best aspects of being a Vimean!

One of the easiest ways to keep up with what's going on, is to check out the postings in the Festivals and Contests forum. This is where you can read about, or let others know about events, meetups, or find great festivals and contests to submit your films and videos to.

Here's a great example of something coming up next week in New York City:

Earlier this year Vimeo teamed up with the Imagine Science Film Festival (ISFF) as an official media sponsor. The ISFF highlights original movies with a science or technology theme and/or movies that have scientists, engineers, or mathematicians as the lead characters. A lot great material was submitted via the ISFF Group here on Vimeo and now the time has come to announce the winners.

So if you're in the New York City area, come check out this event.

Sneak-Preview Pre-Festival Screening on Wednesday, SEPT 9 at 8PM at Galapagos Art Space.

More details here!

Weekend project time
make a video haiku
and add to the Group

Here are the rules:
Structure - 5 seconds, 7 seconds, 5 seconds

Write your own Haiku, or you can use someone else's (be sure to credit the author!)

Either read the Haiku or title it into the video (5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables)

Tag with 'Vid Haiku' and be sure to add it to the Weekend Project Group!

The videos are due Tuesday, August 25, at midnight EST.

Here's a great example by Taylor Gillespie called Dusk.


Update:

All of you did great.
We had to pick a winner.
Andy Mellon wins.

Andy wins for his video: Visual:Haiku. Andy gets 250mb more upload space.

Our runner-up is Jesse Larson for her video Haiku: Bashō. She will be receiving 100mb more of upload space.

Thanks for making this a great project, everybody. All of your haikus were awesome. Check out all the videos here - Video Haikus.

We were pleased to discover that the Vimeo community has been nominated for this year's .net Awards. This comes as no surprise to the Vimeo Staff. We obviously spend a lot of time immersed in this community, and we know that there's a good reason that it's talked about time and time again in reviews of the site.

You guys rock.

We do our best to provide you with the best space, but ultimately, it's the creativity, positivity, and good-natured spirit of you all that makes this site what it is: one of the only places on the Internet where you can have a true community experience.

Drop by the official site to cast your vote for yourselves in the "Best Community Site," category. We've got some tough competition, so it's important that you make your voice heard.

Good luck, and thanks for being a part of the community!

Greetings comrades,

We just made some major upgrades to the guts of Vimeo: an improved uploading system and a whole new version of the Advanced API!

The new uploading system should help with the hanging or failing uploads people have been experiencing for very large files, and provides much better interface for everyone. For those of you who have had issues before or prefer our Basic uploader, you can also now seamlessly switch between our Flash (shows progress) and Basic (doesn't show progress) version anywhere an uploader appears. (If you're still having trouble, contact help, comments here for support will go unanswered and might result in public humiliation).

Superstar developer apprentice Brad has been working on version 2 of the Advanced API for nearly a year, and it's finally here! There's a bunch of new methods and a whole new uploading interface, including a very cool segmented upload system. For those of you using v1 of the Advanced API, here's a migration guide. We will be supporting v1 through at least November 13 2009, the Simple API is not affected.

For the Flash developers out there, Casey has released a preliminary Moogaloop API.

Want to stay on top of all the API improvements? We have a blog and a forum.

The Vimeo staff care about you! All of you. We care so much, we made public service announcements reminding you to join us for the Vimeo Super Meetup Party.

Watch all our Vimeo PSAs!

Don't forget, if you can't make it to the New York meet up, maybe you can make it to one of the stops on the Vimeo World Tour. Join the Vimeo Meetup Group to see all the videos, and details for upcoming meet ups that could be happening near you.

If you're able to make it to the New York meet up, be sure to introduce yourself! You can officially start getting excited because we have some absolutely amazing things planned including a few surprises...

See you Saturday, August 15, 2009 at 8:00 p.m.!

Most people like having their picture taken. Photos express certain moments, events and people in an instant. What if you could extend that instant? With long portraits, you can. This weekend, we want you to make long portraits of people you know.

Long Portrait: The long portrait is a video made popular on Vimeo by photographer Clayton Cubitt . A long portrait is exactly like it sounds, a portrait that is long. It's like a photo of someone, but stretched out in video form to show the person's small expressions, mannerisms and gestures.

Check out an example of Clayton's here, as well as a less serious example made by some of the staff here.

Make sure you add your videos to the Weekend Project Group.

The prize: The best Long Portrait will get you 250MB more upload space or 5,000 HD embeds (for Plus users). The runner up will receive 100MB more upload space or 1,000 HD embeds (for Plus users).

Your videos are due on Tuesday, August 4, 2009 by midnight (EST).

Have a good weekend, and remember, the more creative or interesting, the better. This can be a serious and extremely fun project. We look forward to seeing what you guys come up with.


UPDATE:

Whoa! You guys really rocked it on this project. It was amazing to see so many diverse faces and how expressive or un-expressive some people are. Check out all the videos here - Long Portraits.

Here are our winners:
First place goes to Sam McCready for his long portrait of his dog, Berry, "BHNTb Berry Long Portrait". Sam, you will be receiving 250MB more upload space.

The runner-up is SogandB for his long portrait. You will be receiving 100MB more upload space.

Thanks to everybody who participated! This was a very successful weekend project!

We're coming to Europe! That's right, we're kicking off a world tour right after the Vimeo Super Meetup in New York. For 11 days, Karen and I will be traveling to Berlin, Paris, and London, hosting Vimeo Offline parties, meeting as many wonderful Vimeo peeps as possible, and interviewing popular Vimeo creators. We'll be making a sweetacular video blog for the whole trip, so if you can't make it to one of these events, or if you live on a different continent, you can follow along!

While we're in each city, we will be hosting a Vimeo Offline screening and afterparty with sets by VJ's on Vimeo. Think of it as as the perfect time to meet fellow Vimians in your city, chat with Karen and I, and watch some great videos made by people from your city. The venues are still being confirmed, but we've got some pretty cool spots lined up, and the events are shaping up to be pretty rad. Here are the dates so far:

BERLIN, August 19th
Venue: Stattbad Gallery - Gerichtstr 65 13347 Berlin, Germany +49 30 86383155 - 9pm screening followed by a kick-ass dance party with VJ performances by Raquel Meyers - raquelmeyers.com

PARIS, August 22nd
Venue: Dune 18, AV. ClAUDE VELLEFAUX 75010 PARIS - 8pm with a screening of videos by Vimeo members followed by dance party and VJ performances by Charlie Mars - vimeo.com/charlimars

LONDON, August 27 (Tentative)
Our venue for the London event recently fell through. If anyone knows of a cool spot for our screening/party, please let me know.

Dates are subject to change, but we'll keep you posted on all the juicy details.

GET INVOLVED:

First, join the Vimeo World Tour Group to get all the updates, watch the video blogs of the trip as we make them, and add any videos you might take at the events.

Second, if you are from any of the cities (or surrounding areas) and you know you are coming, submit your video by posting a link here and maybe we'll screen your video.

We're really excited about the tour and we hope to see as many of you there as possible. Make sure to save the dates and tell all your friends!

Ever feel like your life needs to be a little bit more animated? Come to our Vimeo Offline!

Join us this Wednesday for an awesome evening of animation from my personally curated channel, Everything Animated. Experience the best 3D, 2D, Pixelation, and Photomotion animation our community has to offer.

Vimeo Offline: Animation
Wednesday, July 15th at 8pm.
@ Monkey Town, 58 N. 3rd St, Brooklyn, NY.

Hope to see you there!