YouTube GuideGeneral
YouTube is the one video site most internet surfers and movie creators turn to first for online video needs. Unfortunately YouTube also has some built in quality issues that can leave your creation looking a far cry from the crisp, beautiful video clip you have sitting on your desktop.
The reason YouTube quality suffers is two fold. They recompress every video you upload and they show all videos in an unusual size. Normal sizes are 480 x 360, 400 x 300 or 320 x 240. YouTube uses 424 x 318. Furthermore, YouTube doesn't care what format your original video is in, they recompress EVERY video that is uploaded.Video Compression
What exactly is "compression" and what does it mean to you? When you take a raw video, whether full motion - something that comes from your digital camcorder, or "presentation" - a video made from a Power Point presentation or put together with stills and text screens you usually run it through a production process.This production process uses a variety of "codecs" to put together the video in a final form. Each media file type - WMV, SWF, MOV etc, uses a different codec to compress the raw video. Some codecs are better than others for full motion videos, others shine at screen capture and text frames.
You'll need to play with your video software to find the best codec and values that will work with your raw footage to produce a crisp, clear finished video with a soundtrack that doesn't make your voiceovers sound like they were done on a 98 cent Radio Shack microphone and recorded in a sewer.
Regardless of what codec you use to produce your final cut, bear in mind that your video will be compressed. YouTube then takes that compressed production and savagely recompresses it even further. The result isn't too awful on full motion videos. Those may be a bit blurry, but generally they come across fairly well.
YouTube will really hurt any video that has text or screenshots. If you're trying to show someone how to do something onscreen that involves following cursor movements and screenshots, they probably won't be able to read anything on that screen. It will come through blurry and the letters often have a "halo" effect that will make any text unreadable.
YouTube Solutions
First - remember the finished size, odd though it is, that will be used by YouTube. Produce your video in that size - 424 pixels x 318 pixels. NEVER go smaller. It is impossible to make something larger and still have decent quality.You can, however, take something bigger and make it smaller and still have good results. A quick fix that sometimes works with YouTube is to double the size of the video during production. Thus, when YouTube compresses your creation, it will lose some definition, but still retain enough to be reasonably crisp and clear.
Doubling will produce a very odd size of 848 x 636. You can even triple the size on short videos to 1272 x 954. These settings maintain the industry standard 4:3 ratio. What this means is that the video is 4 units wide and 3 units tall. This is a standard that all commonly used video editing programs and codecs are built on.
This works best on full motion videos and screen recordings.The Apple Solution
Apple shines when it comes to any sort of image or video manipulation. The .MOV output from Apple is ideally suited for low motion and text based movies. Unfortunately this also produces a larger sized video than an MPEG or WMV format, so watch your size!You can get about 3-4 minutes of low motion video using the .MOV format outlined below in your 100 MB size limit for YouTube. Remember - this setting is for screenshots and text, NOT full motion video.
You'll want to use the Photo-JPG codec, Tru Color (24 bit) with an Automatic frame rate.
Most video editing programs come with the Apple codecs as part of their system. You don't need to own an Apple computer to make videos using Apple .MOV codecs.
Camtasia Solutions
If you own Camtasia Studio, experiment with the Zoom and Pan feature. Sometimes the judicious use of Zoom can make important text readable as you travel around the screen you are filming. Zoom can be used as you film, or in later versions of Camtasia it can be added to the video during editing.
If you're using titles or text boxes use a very legible font. Make it BIG, 18 pixels or more so the halo effects and fuzziness won't affect readability.
Take some time to test different production settings with YouTube or any other site with quality issues. Yes, it may take a day or two to submit different production videos to YouTube until you get the results you need. This is time well spent for marketers. If your video production looks crisp, clear and has clean text, while your competition has merely tossed up a vid that comes through the YouTube compression looking fuzzy, illegible and very unprofessional, who do you think will get more clicks?