Stuff to know....NUKED ! :0

[JoeCool]

Well I've spent the last 6 1/2 hours trying to decide between SmugMug, phanfare and Zenfolio....going through each page, comparing prices and options and reading company bio's/history and even every TOS <ugh>. After all of that I thought that I had finally decided on SmugMug, but one thing really concerns me. Number 4 on your video help page states, "We don't keep a copy of the original video you upload. We make high-quality display copies, which are probably altered from what you send us.". Say what?? I can only imagine the uproar if you made the same statement about the photos people upload. My biggest concern is exactly how high of a quality copy do you make? and why don't you keep the original upload? If you find it faster to process a "High quality copy" so be it, but why not leave the users original video alone? Why delete it?

This concerns me because I use a Canon HF200 camcorder set to the best a/v quality that it has. If I have to break the video's up into ten minute segments, so be it, but if I someday want to download the video's, I would hope that they would be the same quality as they were when I uploaded them.

[nigelbb]

Without exception every single video that I have uploaded to our account at SmugMug has been edited. We keep backup copies of the original source video safe at home so if we want to edit it again or re-use the footage we can. Even with a reasonably network connection it would take forever to upload all the original video files to SmugMug & just would not be feasible. In fact the edited files are then compressed before uploading to SmugMug to speed the upload.

http://www.barkersvideo.com

[JoeCool]

Thanks for the reply. One of the biggest reasons that I've been leaning towards going with SM is because their support through Digital Grin has seemed to be so quick (I've spent a great deal of time lurking around here) I'm a bit disappointed that they haven't responded to my concern. I went to your site and looked at a couple of your videos at mid-res. and the quality looks good to me. I guess if I go with SM I will just have to keep the originals archived somewhere. It was my hope to not have to archive our pics/vids and instead have them kept at a site such as SM.

[nigelbb]

Thanks for the reply. One of the biggest reasons that I've been leaning towards going with SM is because their support through Digital Grin has seemed to be so quick (I've spent a great deal of time lurking around here) I'm a bit disappointed that they haven't responded to my concern. I went to your site and looked at a couple of your videos at mid-res. and the quality looks good to me. I guess if I go with SM I will just have to keep the originals archived somewhere. It was my hope to not have to archive our pics/vids and instead have them kept at a site such as SM.
Smumug is not deigned to archive your raw original video files nor in fact is it set up to archive your raw original still photos if you shoot RAW. If you want online backup to the 'Cloud' there are plenty of services available. As an additional service SmugMug offers for a fee their SmugVault service that uses Amazon web services that allows your to upload, store & retrieve files that do not get processed. http://www.smugmug.com/price/smugvault.mg You would still have the problem of uploading potentially hundreds of GB of files.

[JoeCool]

Smumug is not deigned to archive your raw original video files nor in fact is it set up to archive your raw original still photos if you shoot RAW. If you want online backup to the 'Cloud' there are plenty of services available. As an additional service SmugMug offers for a fee their SmugVault service that uses Amazon web services that allows your to upload, store & retrieve files that do not get processed. http://www.smugmug.com/price/smugvault.mg You would still have the problem of uploading potentially hundreds of GB of files.

I don't shoot raw, my camera is just a Canon 1200 IS. I'm not a professional photographer. I have been looking into using Amazon's S3 service for archival purposes (I did look into SmugVault as well as some other third party providers). I've also thought about hosting the photos/vids on one of my domains, but after the initial setup, my wife will be the one who uploads and categorizes our photos/vids. That is why I'm looking for a very user friendly interface. I was just surprised that SM states that when you upload video that they downgrade it and delete the original.