Recommended movie settings for YouTube (revision 2)
By Rudolf Boogerman |
11 comments... Click to Contribute.
Let me show you how to achieve the best results when uploading your video to YouTube if you have to edit the movie after shooting.
Through extensive testing, I found the best way to upload with the least artifacts and blurry edges as a result. The test movie used for this purpose is a regular video made with a cheap consumer camera, no special lighting and it did not undergo any form of correction.
Before we start, let me tell you something about compression, because this is reason number One that makes movies look bad on YouTube. Compression is a method to reduce the file size of a movie so that it can play easily on the web and from DVD/CD. Therefore, compression is a great thing, but: although sometimes unavoidable, it should never happen twice!
It is very important to realize that practically all consumer- and prosumer camcorders already put some form of compression on their movies. Cheap models will compress strongly, while the midrange models will use a medium- to light compression. On prosumer camcorders you probably won’t notice the compression, but it is still there. MiniDV tapes offer the least compression since size isn’t an issue on those tapes.
Therefore, if you can avoid it, do not compress the movie again, even if you have to add a title afterwards in your favorite movie editor. Always select “None” for compression, unless the file becomes so big that you can’t upload it. In that case, try to use the best possible compression method with the least compression.
See also http://www.miracletutorials.com/hd-video-on-youtube/ for an update on the HD videos on YouTube.
YouTube recommends (checked on 5 July 2009):
- Acceptable movie formats: WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG.
- MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format
- 640×480 resolution for stander vidoes, 1280×720pixels for HD.
- MP3 audio 64kbps Mono , 44kHz, 128kb/s - Stereo
- 30 frames per second
I recommend:
- Preferred formats: .MOV, .MPG
- Uncompressed format if possible (otherwise, MPG4 if you have to)
- 480×360 640×480resolution or HD 1280×720pixels(If you original video is smaller, read How to change the movie format without resizing)
- 480×270 wide screen is recognized as a 16:9 ratio, which is a standard too. Black bands appear on top and bottom, no stretching.
- No compression on audio if possible (otherwise, MP3 audio 128kbps Stereo if the original is stereo, otherwise keep mono)
- The frame rate of your movie. In other words, do not change it.
Detailed recommendation:
If you do not need to do any editing on your movie, .MOV, .MPG, .WMV and .AVI are all fine. YouTube says that .WMV doesn’t give a good result and they provide a workaround for it that consists of upscaling your WMV to 640×480, save it to .MOV and then resize to 320×240 and save it again in .MOV, but I tested that out and even without any compression, the result wasn’t better then uploading the original.
It is a fact that WMV will not look as well as the other formats but if that is what your camcorder delivers, don’t worry, just upload that .WMV and the movie will not be brilliant, but it will be OK.
Although YouTube recommends 640×480 pixels format, when I tested a range of format, 425×319 - 480×360 - 640X480, I didn’t see a noticeable difference. Check it out for yourself:
640×480 sample (size recommended by YouTube)
480×360 (The default size that shows up on YouTube)
425×319 sample (Size that shows up in your own pages when embedding the code)
I recommend uploading with 480×360 if you have the chance.
If you original video is smaller then watch my video tutorial on Resizing videos with Flash MX or higher in the member area.
Like I said, for audio, I wouldn’t go below 128Kbps (Kilobytes per second) and if it is stereo, keep it stereo unless the file size is too big. That way, you still have a significant audio compression and the quality remains good. Below 128KBps, quality rapidly decreases. It does depend on the audio, though. In some cases you can go lower, but voices deteriorate very easily. If you don’t have time for trial and error, you will be fine with 128Kbps. Better stiil, do not use compression at all.
The frame rate is the amount of moving images per second. Best to keep the rate of your original movie unless you have a special reason to change it. I would avoid going lower then 15 frames/sec.
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February 9th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
You use two different numbers for your recommended settings. At first you say 480×380, then you say 480×360.
February 9th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
YouTube currently limits file size uploads to 100MB. How can uncompressed at 640×480 be a recommended setting if that is sure to go quickly beyond the 100MB limit?
February 11th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Hi Jerry,
Thanks for telling me. It is 480×360. I’m sorry about that typo, I will correct it.
February 11th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Hi again Jerry,
You are right that a movie with settings of 640×480 will yield a file bigger then 100MB easily, but this resolution is a recommended size by YouTube. I recommend 480×360, uncompressed, that is to say within reason. If you get a file bigger then 1GB, you will have to use some compression. If you download the YouTube Uploader, you can upload files over 10OMb up to 1GB. You can also compress the files to FLV yourself, so I’m told, but so far I didn’t get good results with that on YouTube and secondly, few people have the option to save to FLV (Flash for video).
I hope this helps. If you have any further questions, just let me know. Thanks
February 14th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Great, thanks!
~JL
March 20th, 2008 at 5:33 am
Try this:
When viewing a movie on YouTube, add &fmt=18 to the end of the URL. In addition to slight video improvement, you should also notice increased audio quality. Notice I use the word “slight.” I hope YouTube goes further than this humble baby step towards something more like Vimeo’s level of quality.
March 21st, 2008 at 9:35 am
Thanks, Deef. Very useful, and indeed it improves the visual quality considerably.
For a moment, I contemplated to write a post about this, but then I thought: “Hang on, who is going to do that when they surf YouTube and bump into your video?”.
Nevertheless, you can add &fmt=18 to your embedding code, that will help a lot,(sometimes it is &fmt=6), so that will give nearly the original quality of the upload. According to my test: If you upload a FLV, with this little hack, the quality is equal to the upload, no difference at all.
Thanks again for sharing this with us Deef!
June 28th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
[...] For uploading video, FLV is alas not properly supported, thus you cannot control your own compression. Hopefully, they will add this format in the future because with FLV, you can preview the end result before you upload since it is not tampered with afterwards(see also Recommended settings for YouTube). [...]
October 9th, 2008 at 7:03 am
[...] explained in Recommended movie settings for YouTube, the reason why you should not upload a compressed movie to most video channels is that, regardless [...]
January 14th, 2010 at 2:48 am
Rudolf,
thanks for sharing this great information, I just have it in my favorites !
You seem the expert on settings, conversions and playing around with youtube
January 14th, 2010 at 5:00 am
Thanks, Ray!
You may also be interested reading this article on YouTube:
http://www.miracletutorials.com/youtube-doubled-the-size-for-uploads/