I'm a newbie when i comes to video editing. Recently I got the Sony HX5V camera, which is capable of full HD (1080i ). When I download the video clips to the computer, they look great. Either using Sony's PMB, or Media Player Classic, or Windows Media Player, the clips play back beautifully.

However, when the clip is uploaded to Vimeo, the resulting playback is rather disappionting. There's lot more smearing and blurriness (pardon my newbie descriptions), and things are not nearly as sharp as they are originally. I know Vimeo transcodes uploaded files. My question is, how can I prepare my 1080i files before uploading to ensure that they'll look as good as possible (or as close to the original as possible)?

Here's a sample:

Test 1080i clip from Sony HX5V on Vimeo

If you look full screen at the palm tree details in the middle of the scene, and compare that to the original file that's downloadable (it's 15MB), I think you can see a clear difference.

Thank you in advance for any help!

HD on the internets is not perfect, and vimeo is no exception.
I'd suggest a quick read through the compression page at vimeo. Restricting your data rate and compressing your audio is key.

Compression guidelines on Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/help/compression)

With single clips like these and if your allowing the downloading of originals files, than I wouldn't worry. Basically if the people want to see higher quality, they'll download it.

Thank you Rusty and Paulo. I followed Vimeo's guidelines for encoding, still got less-than-desirable results. Maybe I'll just add a blurb to the video saying "for best results, please download and playback of your computer" or some such. Thanks again.