First of all, here’s the official You Tube water buffalo movie.
HD UPDATE
DECEMBER 10, 2008 Now that YouTube expanded the viewing area to 640x360px (HD), here are some new settings I tried that work well:
First of all, if you are in Final Cut and you simply ‘Save’ the movie as a Quicktime file (without compression) — as of this post, YouTube will reject it.
Export Quicktime Compression and use H.264 two-pass at 2400 kbps. Set the audio to ACC Stereo 128kpbs.
Processing video on YouTube is slow! I know. Once you have an exported version, upload to YouTube — HD videos take significantly longer to ‘process’ (you’ll see “uploaded (processing, please wait)” — this is normal. Until they fix this, it might take 1-3 hours to process an HD video. Be patient, it works, and will probably be faster in the future.
Best way to upload in SD to YouTube (Standard Def — just like you used to upload before HD)
UPDATE JUNE 21, 2007: Apple announces h.264 for the iPhone — that probably means it works, or will work soon for regular uploads to YouTube.
UPDATE JUNE 1, 2007: Who knows what the future holds, as Google has just announced that it will encode H.264 movies for the Apple TV (and probably the iPhone, look out for those data rate fees to watch those cat videos). Can Apple convince Google to abandon Youtube.com’s current Flash Video format for H.264? Check back soon for more updates.
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On to encoding and uploading. (Personal note: I can’t believe You Tube doesn’t accept the latest Quicktime H.264 or On2 Flash Video 8 codecs.)
Here are optimal export settings for Final Cut, iMovie, Quicktime:
- Export to Flash video, using FLV MX (not the latest FLV 8 On2 codec)*
- Can use 2-pass VBR
- Scale to 320×240**
- Video = 1024 video kbps
- Audio = 128 kbps MPEG-3 audio
The Water Buffalo Movie was exported with those settings, and although You Tube resizes the dimensions to 424×318, it still looks good. It was a 50 meg export and You Tube probably chopped it down to 7-10 megs.
If anyone knows of other formats to export (from Quicktime) and upload to YouTube, please advise. (Ideally, it would be great to export to Quicktime H.264, 2-pass, 1024k video, 128 AAC, at the YouTube dimensons, and export a .MOV file to upload — unfortunately this doesn’t work well with YouTube.)
*I’m using On2 Flix Exporter, and choosing the MX option. If you have Flash Video Exporter installed, I think you need to choose “Sorensen” as the export, not On2.
**It looks like You Tube’s dimensions are 424×318 (4:3), which does not include the play/pause bar, of course. I’ll give that a go next time I export to see if the video quality is better.
This personal wiki page explains a lot about which formats work, don’t work, YouTube error messages (ie, “Rejected – length of video too long”, etc).
YouTube is a hole definetly does not surprise me that they dont accept the latest H.264 and ppl need to realize that theirs way better video hosting sites out there, Stage6 for example kills YouTube in every sort of way, and of course the stage6 requirements are avail for MAC and PC
what is the name of the song playing in the background? it’s beautiful and i’d like to get a recording of it.
More information about the video is here, thanks for your interest.
(It’s my cover of “How to Save a Life” by The Fray.)
I’d be interested to see what your tests reveal concerning the uploading of videos with different dimensions. I know that Youtube recommends resizing to 320×240, but I can’t help but wonder if they’re only saying that to save on server space and that higher resolution videos would actually look better. Please let us know what you discover.
I think the 320×240 deal is for the noobs on the web that use iMovie or whatever Windows ships, and they just select that 320×240 preset.
The “best” setting is really subjective. I’ve been looking at more videos lately there is a threshold at You Tube. Just as long as it doesn’t look terrible, I think these settings (and their recommedations) are as good as it gets.
Keep in mind, you’re uploading your ‘exported’ movie to You Tube so they can re-export it. Third generation video from the original? How good could it possibly look?
I came to this site wondering about a slightly different question… However thanks for the information, it is all very useful.
My question is, what’s the best way (software) to physically upload the file on a Mac? I’ve tried both Firefox and Safari, they seem to just hang there for much longer than it should take to upload. Internet Explorer on the PC gives you a feedback panel, showing you how much has already been uploaded. Surely there is some way of getting a similar result on the Mac, or do I have to use Internet Explorer on the Mac? (yik…)
There is a tool called VideoPut. It can batch upload movies to YouTube and few others websites.
http://nuclear-coffee.com/php/products.php?id=VideoPut
read this
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/youtube_compressor_gary.html
VideoPut is PC only, not Mac – I’m still looking for an answer to the same question as Joe Nash. For now am using archive.org to store videos, since I can use CyberDuck to upload with resume on broken DSL connection for large files (very bad DSL these days)…
What’s the best time to upload your video on youtube.com? I understand that weekends are the time. But does anyone know exact time frame for each day of the week. Many of us want our videos to have the maximum exposure and uploading your video during the peak pear can get some views.
So anyone with a chart for say “The Best Time To Upload Your Videos On Youtube” ? Please give the date, time from and time to, etc.
Thank you much. I hope I will hear some expert here.
@Bhupen: I don’t really know, I just know about the compression settings.
IMO, it is all relative. Best upload time for which time zone? Which country? I’m in China, so if you uploaded in the morning in California I’d see it at night here.
I have your answer Robert and Bhupen.
This post at ReelSEO – http://reelseo.com/youtube-traffic-analysis-seo/ talks about the best time, best day, best category and others for uploading video to youtube.
I went there but you still didn’t mention time. Which time are we talking about even in us there are so many time zones. I guess you meant california time zone? I am pretty sure lot of users have this question but why there are no accurate answers?
For sites like Digg or Reddit, it seems that timing is important. For YouTube, I think it is less important. My point was, if you upload something in the morning in California, thinking that the morning is the best time for an upload, that same upload taking place:
- 3 hours later on the east coast
- 9 hours later in Europe
- 16 hours later in China
I tried that it didn’t work at all.
hello, I found this info very helpful. Thanx guys
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