Sunday, February 1, 2009

Youtube Optimization, Getting the Most Out of your YouTube Videos

By Marcus Richard

You know youve done it. Youre part of the YouTube generation and youve not only watched videos but uploaded them as well. Once you did that though you realized the quality of your video just sucked. You tried a variety of things and still arent happy with the quality.

In the meantime, read through this article and youll get some better looking videos in the long run.

Resolution " Lets face it, YouTube is now HD Ready like the latest LCD and Plasma televisions. So that means you need to adapt to their system in order to get them to play nice. Their native resolution? Its 720p, a 1280x720 pixels of resolution. Its HD quality, so youll need a video source that can handle it if you want HD quality videos. When you save that video for YouTube make sure you do that in 1280x720 and YouTubes compressor will love you for it and reward you with some better quality and give you the luxury of having a watch in HD link on your videos.

Bitrate " Without getting into the technical mumbo jumbo, this is how much information each second of your video is. The more information means the better quality generally. So when youre making your video, editing or converting youll want to get this to somewhere around 6 Megabits-per-second and 8 Megabits-per-second. This will give you a large file size that should fit into the YouTube limits (1GB) and still give you ample quality after the YouTube compression process. This is a good way to make sure your video will retain some semblance of what it looked like when you made it.

While youre 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.

Take all of this into account and youre on your way to some better looking YouTube videos in the near future. Now get out there and get to work! - 16651

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