A lot of people keep asking me that why are some videos on Youtube Gorgeous and the others just crap. When I tell them that it is the Video compression, they get to roll their eyes on me. I tell them that Video compression just does not mean that you compress the size of your videos to make them fit into a 256 MB USB pen Drive. Video compression can mean anything from decreasing the size of your video to optimising it for the best quality possible. I won’t get into a discussion about the Video Compression here. You can always read Wikipedia for that. What I am trying to do here is to tell you that if you upload videos to youtube regularly, these tips will let you make that experience much more simple, charming and will also make your videos much more Viewable.

• Convert your videos

If you have recorded the video on you mobile or recorded it from TV, there are 99% chances that it is in the format that no editing software or Video Uploading site will support. So, you need to convert it first. Here is what I would prefer you to convert your videos to:

NTSC (4:3) size and framerate, deinterlaced
Video Codec: MPEG2 or MPEG4 (MPEG4 preferred)
Video Bitrate: at least 260Kbps (But I would prefer 750 Kbps for better videos)
Audio Codec: MP3 vbr
Audio Bitrate: at least 70Kbps

You can use Alive Video Convertor for this, it is the best in this category.

• Edit you videos

First of all, you will need to edit you videos so that they look more professional. There are a lot of software available for doing that. I personally Use apple’s QuickTime Pro which costs $30 (or you can download it for free, if you know the site that starts will ‘pirate’ and ends with ‘bay’). Or if you are the advanced user, you can use Adobe Premiere, but believe me, that if overloaded with features that you will never use.

• Optimise your Videos

Once you’ve got your clip looking professional, you’re going to make it YouTube ready. YouTube supports a lot of formats nowadays. For a detailed article you can see the support article of YouTube. .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG will be readily accepted including some others like MPEG4 (DivX, Xvid, SVQ3) at 640×480 resolution. But I would suggest to trim your videos to YouTube-native size of 320×240 (that is, QVGA). You may also note that your camera might shoot at a different aspect ration than the 4:3 -aka 320×240. In this case you may want to stretch the video rather than the other way around. It’s also worth noting that the YouTube servers will encode your video and decrease its BitRate. So, you may want to make your videos as much Bit-rich as you can. After all this editing and optimising, it is possible that your videos may have reached the size of a full movie and will definitely take hours together to upload. You will need to compress you video and convert it to DivX so that it can upload faster. There is a tool for doing this, and it is called AutoGK. Just convert your videos to DivX and upload them directly to Youtube. You may also note that you need to keep your videos below 100MB and 10 Minutes size.

Best of luck with your editing thing.

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