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Video Format for YouTube
Does anyone have ideas on the best format for videos to put on YouTube?
Also – is it definitely better to download the video directly from final cut, as opposed to downloading it from an already-made quicktime movie?
Thanks!
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7 Replies
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In most cases you’ll need to transcode to a delivery format; MJPEG & H.264 are the usual choices for Mac users although some upload VP6 or lower quality.
You’ll need to work within the contraints of Youtube – the file must be no larger than 100MB and no longer than 10 minutes. There are ways to get it to accept very high quality VP6 content as well as a bunch of other hacks at forum.doom9.org and forum.Videohelp.com
Here’s a good start: https://forum.videohelp.com/topic336882.html
As to your second question, I’m not sure what you mean by “downloading from Final cut or downloading from an already made Quicktime”
Do you mean exporting from Final Cut/Quicktime?
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The 100mb upload limit is only with their “single file uploader” They now have a “multi-file uploader” that can upload files up to 1GB (though it will take larger files longer to process). According to the Nov 8, 2007 YouTube blog post, this was PC only, however they mentioned they were working on a Mac version. Don’t know if that has been released yet since I’m a PC guy.
There is also a 10 min length restriction…however, some legacy “Director” accounts do not have this limitation (I’ve recently been able to upload a 30+ min video for a client who had one).
The Multi-file uploader is a godsend for content providers as you can queue multiple files to upload with metadata.
I’m sure it is a port over from the Google video uploader utility which was a standalone utility, while the new YouTube seems to run some software in the background but use a webpage interface.Erik
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I should probably mention that no matter what you feed YouTube it will still look like garbage (I would bet that even video encoded to Quicktime Animation would still look like crap once processed).
YouTube suggests some form of MPeg-4, Divx, 3vix, H.264…but they don’t give any useful specifics…but looking at the quality of their own video uploads (have you seen the cnn/youtube presidential debate videos?) You might do some testing on your own to figure out what yields the best results for you.Erik
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Yeah, will it always be better to export directly from final cut as opposed to exporting from a quicktime movie of your film?
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You’re getting a bit confused.
All your clips in FCP are Quicktime movies.
When you capture something from your DV camera, it’s captured as a Quicktime movie.
Apple and FCP are based on Quicktime.
FCP is like a super-duper version of the Quicktime player.
You can open all your ‘FCP’ clips directly in Quicktime player.
Exporting from FCP is basically the same as exporting from the Quicktime player.It’s worth looking at the Help menu in Quicktime player and FCP to get a grasp of these basics.
Check out Wiki and use Google. But best of all read the FCP manuals!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_cut_pro -
Sorry, I’m not being real clear –
Let’s say you compress your film into a 200 MB quicktime movie from FCP. And THEN you compress that 200 MB movie into a movie under 100 MB, through quicktime player…
Is that the same as compressing it to under under 100 MB straight from final cut, or do you lose quality compressing twice? My intuition is yes, because the more transfers you make in film, the poorer the quality is going to be, but I don’t know if it’s the same for digital.
Thanks, sorry I’m kinda new to the this…
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Your intuition is correct, re-compress as few times as possible. If you have no other transcoding application to hand go straight out of FCP to < 100MB.
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