Encoding video for YouTube

How do you get the best out of video on YouTube? Player Communications has just started its channel there and obviously, being a video production company, I want my uploaded videos to look as good as they can. Where did my adventures take me?

The first place I looked was, predictably enough, YouTube’s own Help menu under, “What’s the best format to upload for high quality”. Mistake (… in the UK at least, possibly). Whenever I tried to upload any video clips as a DivX file at 320×240 screen size, at 30fps with MP3 audio as recommended YouTube couldn’t play it. So a period of experimentation began.

I created a little 10 second clip from a good quality original programme shot on PAL DigiBeta and tried encoding it using different formats and bitrates selected from my Canopus Procoder Express software. The 320×240 screen size was good so I kept that as a constant. My material is PAL through and through so I’m rather attached to 25fps. I concentrated on MPEG2, Quicktime and AVI.

• AVIs produced huge file sizes (YouTube has a limit of 100MB which is very generous for a free service as far as I’m concerned) so I left that alone.

• MPEG2 was good. Set to encode at about 2500 kb/sec it produced reasonable quality images/sound at about 20MB per programme minute. So if your video clip runs five minutes that would fit nicely. If the clip’s shorter you can afford to up the bitrate proportionately – so a two minute clip could be encoded at about 6250 kb/sec. The quality gets appreciably better. Equally if you want to run to YouTube’s 10 minute maximum running time, you’ll need to reduce the bitrate and therefore the quality to slip under the 100MB limit.

• Quicktime works out at about the same and I used that too. Visually it had its quirks, just as MPEG1, but was just as good.

If your clip has mostly static images, it’ll look good however you encode. If you have fast movements, mixes, slo-mo etc. you need to experiment. There are so many codecs available under MPG and QT that scramble up your images so differently, you need to try a few. If you don’t want the world to see your tests, just select the “private” option so only you can your disasters. When you find the perfect match for that particular video clip, go “live” with it. Just use your full 100MB each time though.

That’s the way I’m doing it. How are you doing it? Let me know. Thanks.