You know youve done it. Youre part of the YouTube generation and youve not only watched videos but uploaded them as well. Once you did that though you realized the quality of your video just sucked. You tried a variety of things and still arent happy with the quality.

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 ” Lets face it, YouTube is now HD Ready like the latest LCD and Plasma televisions. So that means you need to adapt to their system in order to get them to play nice. Their native resolution? Its 720p, a 1280×720 pixels of resolution. Its HD quality, so youll need a video source that can handle it if you want HD quality videos. When you save that video for YouTube make sure you do that in 1280×720 and YouTubes compressor will love you for it and reward you with some better quality and give you the luxury of having a watch in HD link on your videos.

Bitrate ” Without getting into the technical mumbo jumbo, this is how much information each second of your video is. The more information means the better quality generally. So when youre making your video, editing or converting youll want to get this to somewhere around 6 Megabits-per-second and 8 Megabits-per-second. This will give you a large file size that should fit into the YouTube limits (1GB) and still give you ample quality after the YouTube compression process. This is a good way to make sure your video will retain some semblance of what it looked like when you made it.

There are several other factors that you should think about here as well. The Codec, software that encodes your video to a particular format, for YouTube that is .mov or .mp4 so make sure you have it in that. If you dont youre going to need a piece of video editing software like Quicktime Pro, Premier, or some other software on the market with multiple file format compatibility. Audio should be set in 44.1KHz Stereo MP3 or AAC format on your video and finally get your framerate at 30fps or higher to make sure theres not a lot of jitter and jumps.

Once youve got all this, upload your video, wait for YouTube to process it and you should a nice looking video pushed out to the site for your friends, family and complete strangers. Good Luck in your video marketing efforts.

Tags: Advertising, internet, Internet Marketing, multimedia, optimization, promotion, video, video marketing, video seo, video sharing, youtube

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 11:42 am and is filed under Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.