Creating High Quality for YouTube HD Quality
10-14-09
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 1280×720 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 1280×720 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 ” This is how much data is processed per second when your video is being created or saved. Whenever possible you want this to be as high of a number as you can get. Generally youd like it to be in the range of 6Mbps and 8Mbps. Thats so much data so that when your video goes through the YouTube compressor online, even though there might be a loss of quality, it will still retain enough to look good as it gets popped out the other side. This will make for large file sizes as well so be aware of that.
What else can you do to help YouTube make your video the best it can be? Well you can make sure your audio tracks are set to MP3 or AAC encoding (44.1KHz Stereo) for one. Another thing you can do is make sure the file format is H.264, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 format because quite simply, YouTube doesnt really like much else. You can get yourself a video editor that handles multiple formats to help you with all of this and so that you can convert and edit as you need. You neednt pay a lot for one, even Quicktime Pro is only $30. Finally you can keep your video file above 30 frames per second and this will help reduce jitter after the compression process.
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!
Tags: Video