Video Experts - How Do You Post a YouTube Video That Doesn't Look Like Crap?

I think that if you use a good camcorder, the picture will look better on YouTube.

There is no real trick to it Ron. As long as it is informative, people will not mind that it is not perfect.

Tal

Ron,

Im not sure if this particular lens has been updated after YouTube switched to that wider screen and different code but it has some great tips:
How To Make YouTube Videos Look Great

Hope this helps.

Sagar

I noticed you did not say how you recorded the video or what format it was in. I use a cheap flip recorder and I am pleased with the quality. all I do is convert them from avi files to wmv files to save on size first.
give us the url to your youtube site so we can judge for ourselves?

You may need a better camera. Webcams suck mostly. I use
a Canon DV camera. I don't know about your system but
I have to "render" my videos as .WMVs - and I get to choose
the quality. I then convert the .wmv to MP4 because that
uploads more successfully more often than .wmv.

does bandwidth play a big role in this? I think Josh Anderson has a video in one of his prod. sig's where he explains this.

Use a camera that films at least 30 frames per second and at least 640X480

When you save the finished video, make sure its at least 2mbps bitrate

Hi,

I have started to use Camtasia recently and my videos
on YouTube turned out to be crap too, in some ways.

What are the right settings to set before we covert
into video format?

Cheers,
John

Well, in my case, it would be to use someone other than myself in the video.

Hey Ron,

I'm not a video expert, but I just recently started following YouTube's
guidelines for best video formats and they look pretty good now.
(can't show you any of them though - ask Ambrosio, he'll tell you )

Here is Youtube's Best Video Format guidelines page:
Optimizing your video uploads - YouTube Help

Hope this helps
Jason

Do that... but I recommend avoiding WMV as it does nothing but degrade the quality. Stick with either m2t, avi, or mp4 either uncompressed or if you must compress to stay under 1gb use h.264 but very little compression.

But the real answer is that you cannot stop youtube videos from looking like crap. You can only make them look a little less crappy by uploading the highest quality master file possible while staying under the 1gb limit.

Youtube made some changes recently to ensure that standard videos look like garbage. But they also added the HD link which can be achieved by doing what thehypnotist posted.

The problem though is that YT encodes HD at 2000kbps which makes streaming without buffer issues just about impossible for the major portion of the US market.

What that means is that if you are publishing anything direct response on youtube that people will not wait for to load you had better go for the standard and HQ link under it and not the HD link.

That is achieved by uploading below 1500kbps.

There are a lot more quality strategies that I have that I will not explain here but they are all targeted for various purposes such as whether you are uploading for view on YT or primarily for the purpose of embedding on your own site.

That page contains the best advice for improving quality of YT videos in general.

You know what is amazing... they only updated that page recently to match some of the changes they made to the system and how it encodes. Up until this update Youtube has had instructions on their site that actually resulted in poorer quality videos. For years whomever they had running the place after the acquisition had no clue how to optimize its use.

Its actually refreshing to see some good instruction and correct advice finally published by YT themselves because before that all their advice and suggestions were pretty much junk.

Here is what I have to say about the recent quality changes on YT and HD on YT.

Two factors come into play here..

The first one is the resolution- the higher the better. Something shot on a webcam or mobile phone is going to look like crap because it's low-res. Use a good quality camcorder to begin with. Conversly, if you're using Camtasia, set your screen resolution as small as possible. This is because YouTube will make the picture even smaller, and minor details will be lost (for the Camtasia footage I've got on my YouTube channel, YouTube - LearnPhotoshopFast's Channel, I set the resolution to 800 X 600)

File format plays a big role in how good your YouTube videos will look. If you can upload them as AVI files, then do so as that seems to be the most compatible. If not, a WMV file is the next best option IMHO. Anything in Flash is going to look terrible

Hmmm well

1. use the HD function
2. Get a mac for sure
3. It's all about compression (u tube compresses the hell out of your vid...so...)
4. The more views you get the clearer it gets, i guess it a youtube algo of some sort

But I'd say get a mac for sure.

Just a quick reply.

This is about encodeing/resizing correctly.. PM for my ebook about EXACTLY this (its a bonus with Screencapture Magic - see sig)

For Camtasia/Camstudio users the correct encoding tools AND capturing at the right size make a huge difference to the quality.

Oh and all those people suggesting upload HD movies... for YT to shrink down - waste of bandwidth and unpredictable qualities...
Clues..
480x360 res is best (YT will not resize this as its the high quality res - they will create a 320x240 version for the lower quality version)

When resizing captures, bilinear 3x3 or Sincoz algorithms work best..
(Virtualdub is your friend!)
Encode to H.264 2-passes, best quality you can... ffmpeg or memcoder (with suitable gui wrappers around these command line tools).

Kind regards, Spencer

in what format do you upload the videos???????

It depends on what you are trying to accomplish but the basic rule of thumb is:

The least compressed highest quality avi or m2t or mpeg4 you can at under 1 gig

Never upload a compressed video if possible. If you must compress just use h.264 and minimal compression.

You might want to actually read this thread because your question was answered several times already as well.

can't go wrong with avi