If you’re like millions of others around the world you’ve been to and even uploaded videos to YouTube. But then you had all sorts of problems getting your files to show properly or look good or a hundred other things. So here is a quick how-to that will help you optimize your video for YouTube You need to make sure that when you save your video for YouTube that you do so in a format that is not only compatible with YouTube buy will display properly when streamed back through the web to your viewers.

So heres the skinny on what you need to do to get your videos to be all they can be on YourTube without massive headaches, expensive hardware and Hollywood-sized editing budgets. The following are the major points to take into account prior to uploading your videos.

Resolution ” YouTube display in a fairly specific resolution and to help their compression utilities get your video up with the minimum of loss of quality you need to match your video up to their resolution. Since they’re using 720p now, which means you should have 1280×720 pixel resolution you need to set your video resolution accordingly. This will cut down on compression time and give you a better idea of what your video will look like in the end. Its not so bad really. The resolution is HD and that means that you can get a real HD experience out of YouTube.

Bitrate ” This is how much data is processed per second when your video is being created or saved. Whenever possible you want this to be as high of a number as you can get. Generally youd like it to be in the range of 6Mbps and 8Mbps. Thats so much data so that when your video goes through the YouTube compressor online, even though there might be a loss of quality, it will still retain enough to look good as it gets popped out the other side. This will make for large file sizes as well so be aware of that.

What else can you do to help YouTube make your video the best it can be? Well you can make sure your audio tracks are set to MP3 or AAC encoding (44.1KHz Stereo) for one. Another thing you can do is make sure the file format is H.264, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 format because quite simply, YouTube doesnt really like much else. You can get yourself a video editor that handles multiple formats to help you with all of this and so that you can convert and edit as you need. You neednt pay a lot for one, even Quicktime Pro is only $30. Finally you can keep your video file above 30 frames per second and this will help reduce jitter after the compression process.

Now that youve got that all set, save your file and upload to YouTube. Having set many of your settings at or better than YouTube you are making it a touch easier for them to compress. So wait until its done and voila! You have got yourself a good looking YouTube Video.

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