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).