In an ideal world the best way to show a video to clients is to bring the client into your office. This facilitates communication and allows you to control the viewing for best effect. If you have some kind of screening room, they’ll see it on your best screen while they sit on a couch and sip the latte you offered. If you want to build a solid business relationship, this will help. And if you want to discuss additional editing options, your edit machine is nearby.

Private YouTube Video

There are definitely pros and cons to using YouTube for showing video to clients. On the con side, YouTube is a non-professional arena as a presentation outlet. You have no control over the other garbage that pops up when your video is finished. On the pro side though, videos on YouTube do look great and run perfectly without stuttering or otherwise marring the viewing experience. YouTube gets more friendly all the time. Now you can upload a custom thumbnail to represent the video. You can also have much longer videos if you follow the instructions. In general YouTube is very easy to use and fast.

Many producers prefer Vimeo because it has that independent film ethos. My own experience on Vimeo was less than inspiring. I had to ask for a refund for my payment as the Pro version presented a poor viewing experience to my client. The video would not play without issues. I immediately moved it to YouTube where they played perfectly. Some days Vimeo is fine, but I wasn’t paying just for some days. YouTube is more stable, just works better.

If your client is in the corporate world, YouTube-type sites are sometimes blocked by corporate networks so alternatives must be found. They are easy to find. It used to be more common way to share large files by uploading to a clients’ FTP account on their server. While this is still used by some, the cloud now offers great features and prices.

Many people are happy with DropBox.com. Some producers upload a compressed low-res window dub with visible time code. The client can make notes on the site and then when the picture is locked, they upload the high-res version of the locked file. $10/month/100GB

Screenlight http://www.screenlight.tv/ is another one that producers speak highly of. And there are many more storage sites available. Microsoft’s OneDrive offers 7GB for free and charges $25 a year for each 50GB. https://onedrive.live.com/about/en-us/plans/
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But the best deal of all may be Google Drive https://drive.google.com/. Google offers 15 gigabytes for free. And last week, Google just cut prices for its monthly online storage plans to $1.99 for 100 gigabytes, and to $9.99 for 1 terabyte. Check out Google’s answers about “Video files in Google Drive.”

As Arun Taneja, the founder of Taneja Group, a consulting firm specializing in storage technology says,“Google is doing to big data companies what Amazon has done to bookstores.”

As the cost of cloud video storage keeps dropping, I wonder how low can it go.