If you are like millions of others around the world, you’ve been to and even uploaded videos to YouTube. But then you had all sorts of problems getting your files to show properly or look good or a hundred other things. So here’s a quick how-to that will help you optimize your video for YouTube You need to make sure that when you save your video for YouTube that you do so in a format that is not only compatible with YouTube but will display properly when streamed back through the web to your viewers.
So here’s the skinny on what you need to do to get your videos to be all they can be on YouTube without massive headaches, expensive hardware and Hollywood-sized editing budgets. The following are the major points to take into account prior to uploading your videos.
Resolution ” YouTube display in a fairly specific resolution and to help their compression utilities get your video up with the minimum of loss of quality you need to match your video up to their resolution. Since theyre using 720p now, which means you should have 1280×720 pixel resolution you need to set your video resolution accordingly. This will cut down on compression time and give you a better idea of what your video will look like in the end. Its not so bad really. The resolution is HD and that means that you can get a real HD experience out of YouTube.
Bitrate ” You’re asking what the heck that is right?
Well simply its now much information your video will contain per period of time. Normally this comes up in Kilobits or Megabits per second. Obviously in this regard the higher the better. However if you go too high the video files will far exceed the limitations of YouTube so you need to learn balance Grasshopper. In this case you still want a high number but you dont want it to be sky high. Somewhere around 6Mbps to 8Mbps is a good range. Then when the video gets to the YouTube compactor itll have enough data to retain quality. YouTube can handle up to 1GB of file but only 10 minutes so pay attention to that also.
While you are thinking about the other things youve also got to think about several more things, audio is one of them. You need to have this in MP3 or AAC (44.1KHz Stereo ideally) on the track or you risk losing quality during compression and conversion. Your best bet is to set this to CBR of VBR if you have the option. Framerate is another thing you should pay attention to. To keep thinks flowing smoothly youve got to maintain a minimum of 30+ FPS or frames per second. The file format you need to have your stuff in is .mov or .mp4. If your video editing package cant handle that then youre going to want to look into one that can. Quicktime Pro is often touted as the ideal since its both cheap and handles a wide variety of video formats.
Once you’ve got all this, upload your video, wait for YouTube to process it and you should a nice looking video pushed out to the site for your friends, family and complete strangers. Good Luck in your video marketing efforts.
