YouTube settings?

[Briantho]

With a major family event due to happen soon I'm charged up and ready to take a few minutes of video, upload it and send the link to my entire address book.

I just did a search around here for 'Youtube' and there was no reference in the awesome "Wiki" file either so my question is: what have people here found to be the optimum settings for uploading to Youtube?

[ed]

I use Quicktime H.264 at

29.97 frame rate (I think that's it, but just use whatever DV is)
60 keyframes
AAC stereo sound at better or best setting (128 khz I think)
de-interlaced video
set the video dimensions to the same size as the player

I use Quicktime Pro for this, but you can get the same settings from MPEG Streamclip. Not sure about APE, because I don't use it to export this format. If you're worried about file size you can reduce the framerate to 24, and change the sound to mono. In fact, I believe youtube changes all sound to mono when it encodes to Flash.

Also, check out vimeo.com. I think the quality of the video encoding is much better then youtube. With vimeo I set the video dimensions at 400 x 300.

[Briantho]

Thanks Ed. It's obviously time I had a good look at Quicktime!

[Chuck Engels]

Why not upload your video here Brian, it stays in whatever format you use, no conversion like the other sites.

[Briantho]

Great idea Chuck, thanks! All the same, I suppose my PAL 16:9 exported AVI file would have to be 'set' in some way or do I actually upload the few minutes as they are?

[Chuck Engels]

I think there is a file size limit, Ron mentioned it before. Somewhere around 75mb I think. What size is the file?

I always use the default 320 x 240 WMV export, it seems to work very well. Or as Ed suggest you can still export as MOV, that way it is easier for someone with a MAC to view.

[Briantho]

I think there is a file size limit, Ron mentioned it before. Somewhere around 75mb I think. What size is the file?

I always use the default 320 x 240 WMV export, it seems to work very well. Or as Ed suggest you can still export as MOV, that way it is easier for someone with a MAC to view.

That's great - it'll only be a few minutes fo the limit won't be an issue. Thanks for the tip on MOV

[Paul LS]

Carefull Brian, Dv-AVI is 220MB per minute... If the upload limit is 75MB that would be 20 secs...

[Briantho]

Carefull Brian, Dv-AVI is 220MB per minute... If the upload limit is 75MB that would be 20 secs...

Ah, good point, thanks Paul!

[Chuck Engels]

My point is that you can use any of the standard formats, including FLV, and the video will not be recompressed or converted to another format.

Paul is correct, you will not want to use AVI but MOV, FLV, WMV will all work and look great at the default DSL setting. Just export the video in any of the compressed formats and upload, no changes will be made on our end.

[RJ Johnston]

I was reading that Apple is converting all the Flash videos on YouTube to h.264 format so the YouTube videos can be played on the Apple TV.

Is that a blow to Adobe?