The best way to host
a cinematography reel.

So the hosting question is not really a hosting question. It is a question about the last encode in the chain. You spent the grade deciding how much texture stays in the shadows. If the platform re-encodes your upload and delivers a rendition it chose, the producer is grading that rendition, and you never see it happen, because you are watching your own memory of the shot rather than the pixels on their screen.

The answer that follows from that: host the reel where the file is served as you exported it, and judge every candidate on four things. Does it re-encode. Does it brand the player. Does the page look like yours. Does the link survive a re-cut. Everything else on a hosting comparison page is noise for this particular job.

One caveat that makes this honest rather than absolute: no host can make a browser decode something it cannot decode. Whether a given export plays smoothly is decided by the viewer’s browser, hardware and connection. A host can only promise not to make the file worse before it gets there.

Read the fine print on that ladder before you read the numbers. The maximum is a maximum, and complexity pushes the actual encode below it. A dialogue two-shot on a clean wall is not complex. A handheld night exterior with 35mm grain and rain in the backlight is about as complex as moving pictures get, which means the reel that most needs the bits is the one most likely to be given fewer of them.

The ladder also stops where it stops. Vimeo generates a 5K to 8K transcode only when the creator uploaded an HDR file above 5K resolution, and it restricts above-4K playback to specific desktop browsers with supporting hardware, with no support on mobile. For a reel that is mostly a footnote, since almost nobody delivers a reel above 4K, but it is worth knowing the ladder is not open-ended.

YouTube is still the right answer when the goal is discovery and reach. Nothing else puts your work in front of people who were not already looking for you, and a public upload is indexed, recommended and shareable in a way no private host can match. What you give up is documented rather than rumoured: YouTube says it always re-encodes, its Terms grant it the right to display ads on or within Content, its Help pages say ads may appear on videos you never monetised and on channels outside the Partner Program, and its player documentation says related videos cannot be switched off. Treat the YouTube copy as the trailer. Do not treat it as the master.

Vimeo remains a strong, well-understood default that a hiring producer will never question. It is the address the industry expects, showcases are a real portfolio tool, and Standard and above can customise a showcase’s domain, which is something we do not offer at all. The trade is the ladder: a published 22 Mbps maximum at 4K, and Vimeo’s own note that complex images may transcode lower. There is also a bandwidth threshold of 2 TB a month, with a seven-day window to resolve an overage and a stated risk of temporary suspension, though Vimeo publishes exemptions for creative professionals and for small nonprofits, so a working DP’s reel is unlikely to be the account that trips it.

Self-hosting is the honest maximalist choice. Total control, no branding, no policy that can change under you. Also every playback problem, every encoding decision and every bandwidth invoice becomes yours. A studio with an engineer can make it excellent. One cinematographer maintaining one reel usually discovers the portfolio has been broken for a month during the month they were busy shooting.

uncompressed.io is built for exactly the fourth column and nothing else. There is no encode step anywhere: the file is stored as uploaded and served as uploaded, with no bitrate ceiling and no resolution ceiling, and 50 GB per file as the only published limit. The player carries no branding of ours on any plan, including the free one, and shows no ads, no related videos and no end screen. Your page is provisioned automatically at yourname.uncompressed.io and builds itself from tags on the films you have already uploaded: Hero runs full width, Featured sits in pairs, Standard lands three across, Hidden drops out. Each film gets a slug you choose, and replacing the file leaves the link, the embed and the slug untouched. It is the wrong tool if you want reach, and the wrong tool if the reel has to live on a domain you own, because there is no custom-domain feature here.

Most working cinematographers end up running two copies, and that is not a compromise so much as the correct answer to two different jobs. The public copy goes wherever the audience already is, and its job is to be found. The real reel, the one on the résumé, the festival form and the cold email to a producer, goes on a host that serves the file you graded, at an address that says your name.

If you want the longer version of this argument, including how to tell whether a host has quietly re-encoded something you already uploaded, it is in our guide to video portfolio hosting for filmmakers, which this page sits under.