aka ‘Getting it right’
As you all might (or might not know) YouTube is the biggest video sharing site on the interwebs. If you have an interesting video you upload it and just about everyone in the world can see it. Now YouTube can take many different kinds of formats: avi, mpg, dvix, etc… Once you upload your video YouTube’s massive server farm will then convert your video to their format. What is ‘their’ format? Hell, I don’t know.
It has taken me six years to ‘figure out’ what format I need in order for thier format to make it look good.
If you look at video from 2004 through to 2007 you will notice all the videos have the same compresstion or ‘look’ or ‘quality’ to them. This is because once I ‘finialized’ the video I would then conver them to .wmv (that’s Windows video format) then I uploaded them to YouTube. The overall qualily isn’t that great at all but it looked better than the five or six other formats I tried before reaching that one. So let’s look at the ‘old’ formula:
Finialize video in Adobe Preimer –> Convert in Windows Movie Maker –> Upload to YouTube.
Miguel was my wise teacher in the ways of video conversion techniques and he told me about Divix, a great video codec or ‘format’. Apparently YouTube video would look so much better if you sent your video to them in Divix. So I downloaded the player and tried it. It looked better! So now if you go look at 2008 through 2009’s According To Whim’s YouTube videos you will see the quality is improved.
Improved but not as good as some other people’s videos on YouTube. The biggest issue I had was that the video looks ‘squeezed’. I let it go because the video was still an improvment over older videos and I could now say the videos were in HD (high-definition).
Fastforward to very early 2010. I was on YouTube and couldn’t help byu notice that there were some videos out that that not only looked FANTASTICLY CLEAR but filled in the entire YouTube video player window. I decided I needed to get our video formats in order before Season 2 came out. I started some research into video conversion for YouTube. Now I had done this before (a few time actually) but since the last time I did it YouTube had really made the push to Hi-Def videos.
FINALLY I found it! I had not ever bothered to mess with the more custom settings in the Divix conversion program but found that I could and therein lie the key to excellent video.
Premier –> Divix 1080 custom settings –> YouTube = excellent
So are you ready for the secret of my success? Here it is: Convert you videos in the Divix conversion program and use the custom settings to make your video 1280×720 and double the bit rate (it makes the video very large in size but YouTube will accept it). From there you can play the size and bring it down a bit and it will still fill in the entire window and look great too.
So there you go. It literally took me six years to figure it out and I shared it with you in less than six minutes. Isn’t the interweb great?