You got that shiny HD camera recently and you want your footage to show up on Vimeo HD, correct? Follow this Sony Vegas Platinum/Pro guide on how to setup your project settings, and how to export from it in a way that Vimeo re-encodes your footage as 720p HD.

1. Project Settings

On Vegas, it’s very important to have the right project settings before you start editing. Click “File”, then “Project Properties”, and a new dialog will pop up. In there, click the right outmost icon called “Match Media”, the one that looks like a yellow folder. From there, select one of the files you will be editing with, and click “open”. For the de-interlacing option select “interpolate”, and for quality select “Best”. For NTSC HDV for example, it would look like this (you can safely ignore additional settings not shown in my screenshot but found on Vegas Pro instead of Platinum). After you setup your project settings, click “Ok”, and edit your video as you would normally do. Save often.

2. Exporting with Vegas Platinum: Windows Media WMV

For the Platinum 7/8 edition of Vegas, WMV is the only workable solution as it’s the only “delivery-grade” encoder that allows user customization in that Vegas edition. To get the WMA 9.2 audio abilities you need to install first Windows Media Player 11 for XP (Vista comes with it), and then follow the visual guide here to export in WMV. The only thing that might need adjustment is the frame rate if you didn’t shoot in NTSC or if you shot in true 24p. This WMV export works great with the XBoX360 too.

3. Exporting with Vegas Pro: MP4 h.264/AAC

If you have Vegas Pro 7/8 instead, you can export to h.264 either by using MainConcept’s or Sony’s h.264 AVC encoder. Use this visual guide to export to MainConcept or this one to export to Sony AVC. The only thing that might need adjustment is the frame rate if you didn’t shoot in NTSC or if you shot in true 24p. Please note that if you are getting crashes during rendering, you must go to Vegas’ Settings, click the video tab and lower the number of threads to “1″. These h.264 files work with both the XBoX360 and the PS3 too.

4. Conclusion

So, after your rendering is complete with one of the methods above, simply upload the resulted video file to Vimeo, add the comma separated tags “HD” & the model of your camera (e.g. “HV20″), and in about an hour’s time (depending on your uploading internet speed) it will be available in glorious HD through the web browser. Please note, you will need a really fast computer to get HD Flash video playback smoothly on your web browser. If Vimeo does not re-encode your HD video in HD mode, it means that one of their encoders crashed (it happens regularly), so you will have to leave them a message at their forum and ask them to fix it for you. Finally, I recommend you allow users to download your videos as it’s nice to be able your hands to the original higher bitrate/quality version and enjoy it via a proper media player, or the Xbox360/PS3/AppleTV on a big TV.