Introducing the new UPLOAD FILE button

rockpickerforever, yeah, I have PS for images, too. I did A LOT of research when I began making videos and Handbrake was highly recommended.  It's super easy- drag and drop. You can get technical if you want, but the presets are pretty easy and it has a web optimized button. It'll shrink a file.

I'm totally with you - that's why I mentioned there were variables to the video file sizes.

I'd certainly advocate occasional use, especially with compression as you noted. But, as the number of vids increase, so does potential viewership and bandwith usage. As long as someone is diligent in monitoring, it may not be an issue. However, if one starts doing the math with additional videos and user views the bandwidth can disappear quickly.

Transformations are an entirely different thing altogether. I believe, in short, a transformation done in Cloudinary is one way of delivering content - with certain parameters being programmed such as size and other effects. I don't believe this would apply to any of our users, as the video would be uploaded and delivered as is. However, I don't really know for sure.

But, if there are "default" parameters that would apply, do those count as transformations as well? Tommy , any idea?

The scary thing about video transformations is that 2 transformations are counted for every second of video. If default settings for video delivery count as a transformation, is this a potential impact?

Again, maybe not an issue. I really don't know.

Hah, I was going to ask you to load up a raw video and see if you could have folks view it to see if any transformations showed up. You beat me to it.

I haven't looked that deeply into how the fee is figured yet. Don't know if it's simply based on the fact that a vid (for instance) is loaded on a page, or if it relates to actual viewing time.

If you start a new thread somewhere, perhaps there may be more viewers.  You could always note that your test results will be placed back in this thread, so it would direct folks here (more exposure about the new photo program).  But, as long as the results are here, you can probably place it where you'd like.

Results:  The bottom line is that videos, even small videos like mine, hog up the bandwidth. In less than 2 days, like a day and half, I clocked 1 GB in bandwidth! One can imagine if it were longer and if it were up longer. It would whittle down the monthly allotment of bandwidth pretty quick. The free side has 20 GB of bandwidth available. At about a gig a day for a small video, not counting images hosted, too, I wouldn't last a month. 

So, it is still a better idea to use Youtube or another platform to host videos. 

Thanks for all the clicks! RTHers had 451 requests for the video! That's impressive guys. It really helped to get an idea of what we were looking at as far as bandwidth. 

I can see that it is real easy to blow thru the 20gb bandwidth limit. what happens if that limit is reached? I deleted my videos from cloudinary, can people still see them here? I think I will limit my usage of it on here to photos. For images it is real easy and works good, at lest when posting photos from your computer.

Thank you for the excellent study rockjunquie and aDave for raising the questions. It is definitely eyes-open material that warrants a word of caution in the tutorial so members are aware that blowing through the free account IS possible.

Just to play devils advocate for a minute - and I'm not saying that the numbers are skewed by the nature of the "click me" thread, but I do still have to wonder about the high initial click rate that was generated on purpose. I purposely clicked on it a dozen times just to help the cause of knowledge. I wonder what initial bandwidth would have been used if posted in a regular thread in the wire wrapping thread. I may have to do some ninja stealth testing on this question.

It is my un-scientific thought right now that there would be a natural curve that would peak in the first 1-3 days after a new post was made that would then shrink down to a minuscule amount of bandwidth use over time as the video is viewed frequently at first then drops off to rarely to barely any. I would say that the bandwidth would peak to the tested 1 gig range at the very most for a couple of days then curve down to almost nothing.



I guess where I'm going with this - and again it's unscientific - the 20 gigs resets and starts over every month so the real question is what is my residual bandwidth (views of my previously posted videos) that would remain if I had posted 1000 videos over time and each one had slumped down the page and barely got played anymore.

Without posting any new videos is my baseline residual bandwidth usage 1 gig per month? is it 10 gigs per month? We don't know that so we don't know how close to trouble we would be if after all this I suddenly posted five videos at the same time and temporarily wrecked my bandwidth for the month up to say 10 gigs until they curve down and become base residual.

My hypothesis is that in a forum setting where individual post views quickly curve into oblivion, *storage* is still the statistic to watch. If I was running a large website where my video views would remain consistent because they were posted on a prominent and frequently viewed page that didn't curve, bandwidth would be a more finite and measurable element.

That being said, I don't do a lot of videos so most of my activity on Cloudinary will be generally just posting photos and trying to avoid anything that needs "transformation."

Noooo... that is an indigenous species - Eagle Lake rainbow trout. Stocked into other lakes like Almanor but this beauty was caught by my son at Eagle Lake. He dropped it off here on the way back through town.

The meat is red and delicious - cooks pink - like salmon.