Optimizing High Quality Videos for Youtube

[HI-TECH]

I am trying to get the very best quality for my youtube videos in Camtasia Studio but unfortunately had no luck in doing this. i followed the directions to all of the videos I saw online to do this, but unfortunately the 'high quality setting" never appeared. Here were my settings for the video encoding



Video File Format: Quicktime (MOV)
Compression Type: H.264
Frame Rate: 12
Compressor Quality: Medium
Key Frames: Automatic

Audio
Compressor: MP4 format
Rate: 48.000 khz
Size: 16 bit
Use: Mono

[refraction]

i dont think high quality mode allows HD formats, it still has to be xvid or divx.

but i'm guessing.

[HI-TECH]

Originally Posted by refraction

i dont think high quality mode allows HD formats, it still has to be xvid or divx.

but i'm guessing.

so how should I tweak the settings above to get High Quality?

[cottonvibes]

if what ref says is true, then encode the video in divx or xvid with a converter or something.

i haven't uploaded any videos to youtube before, so i don't know much about what formats it accepts.

[HI-TECH]

Ok but here's another question I have. Say for instance

-I made a movie in HQ with Windows Movie Maker
-Then I put it in another video editing program to add my watermark (Camtasia Studio, Vegas, Premiere)

What setting would I use to make sure NONE of the quality was taking away from the original movie that was made in Movie Maker?

[Anatasia]

Just use the losssless codec out there.And sorry to say but Windows movie maker doesn't use a video lossless codec.So i'm sure that something has already been lossy.

[HI-TECH]

Originally Posted by Anatasia

Just use the losssless codec out there.And sorry to say but Windows movie maker doesn't use a video lossless codec.So i'm sure that something has already been lossy.

alright I'm gonna try that now! Thank you very much!

[hushypushy]

You should probably stop using Movie Maker, it's a gigantic piece of crap and so are its encoding settings.

If you have Vegas or Premiere....why not use those from the beginning? First of all, they're better than Movie Maker in every possible way, and second, it appears that you're using those programs anyway

The more you re-encode or re-process something, the more quality it will lose. The best thing to do is keep the encoding to a bare minimum. Personally, I use Premiere Pro 1.5 and that's it; the clips go from my camera to my PC losslessly via firewire, and then I have Premiere spit out a lossless DV file which I put into Virtualdub for encoding (usually I use Xvid and MP3). I upload that straight into Youtube and so far the results have been pretty good.

[godking]

I've uploaded videos in .mov that show up as HQ. The video resolution is 640x480.

[Hard core Rikki]

It used to be possible to go higher, sometime ago (as high as 4000 or 8000 kilobps. bitrate wasnt as much a contraint as was resolution, since few systems can handle realtime or buffered decoding of flash videos higher than 800x600, and freely increasing bitrate only reduced the running time available for the videos). Most videos on youtube that have abnormally high quality and the suffix HD used that method, it seems (not sure if it is now finally blocked by youtube for new videos)

[Squall-Leonhart]

actually, the highquality is 480x360.

YouTube's high quality videos are available in two versions, both of which have a maximum picture size of 480 x 360 pixels. By adding &fmt=6 to the web address of a video, it is played using the H.263 codec with mono sound, and by adding &fmt=18, it is played using the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec with stereo AAC sound.

[godking]

So now I'm wondering if I should just record at 480x360 instead of 640x480 (which I see a lot of people recommending).

There's still the problem with Google Video handling Youtube videos differently than Youtube does.

[Xblade]

Originally Posted by hushypushy

You should probably stop using Movie Maker, it's a gigantic piece of crap and so are its encoding settings.

Agreed.
Every time I think of wmm I feel like materializing all of my video files and smashing them to bits.