drumroll please.......
i am in the process of taking my first venture into the glorious world of youtube...and problems are abound!
i've been trying to post my measly 4 minute video but everytime i upload and view it the final product is GARBAGE!
it looks like web video circa 1995 (i.e. blocky, terrible and full of teenage angst).
No matter what settings i've tried i get the exact same results.
currently i'm using premier 6.5 (yeah thats right, it still exists) and it's built in compressors.
i've scoured the youtube website and all that i can find is that they perfer the video to be under 10 minutes and 100 MB.
At premiere's seemingly lowest compression i am ending up with a file that is around 70MB.
Heres another problem, the 70MB compressed file looks fine (well, acceptable) on my system but when youtube recompress its total shite!
come on all you you-tubers, help a brother out here and let me know your secrets!

thanks in advance
Jay

You could try a DivX file. The divX encoder (the function is standalone and called "Converter", is downloadable as a trial. I thought it was free but only the player is. That seems to yield the best reuslts from an exported .avi file.

Jason,

You may want to read this thread...

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=83786&highlight=youtube

Jason - what codec are you using? If you provide a link the we might be able to diagnose the problem. Youtube does resize and recompress your file, (then stretches it on the webpage to make it look bigger) but it should look better than 1990s web video.

My wife has some films up on youtube: This one was encoded as a XviD file and looks pretty good: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttZxONzWOlU

Obviously there are artefacts, but youtube crushes the file down to FLV, 320*240, 300k/s, and makes the sound mono, 22050 hzand 54k/s, so it does a pretty good job considering all that.

Hi.

I just posted up to YouTube for the first time on Sunday with these two clips:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN8mWiRotIo

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFk7p102hTQ

I exported a full quality AVI file out of Premiere Pro 2.0, and used MPEGStreamClip software (free) to encode to MPEG4 using H.264, 320x240, and I experimented with various quality settings to get it just under a 100 mbs It looks compressed, but not terrible in my opinion. Much better than some I've seen.

Good luck!

Is there a reason that you want to use youtube? Just checking because there was a time that I thought that was the best iption for posting web video fro free but that is just not the case. One option is to post it on http://www.archive.org/index.php . It's free and you get to decide the codec. There are other options as well. Just trying to be helpful.

Jon Bufkin
http://www.jonbufkin.com

thanks for the help guys, i am going to give that squared 5 software a shot.
it blows my mind that it can be complicated though, you know?
10 year old kids are posting crystal clear video on youtube without any problems...maybe i'm just getting old.
thanks again, gotta go shake my fist in the air at some kids listening to "that damn devil music."

I have to agree with the divx poster. Seems like I have gotten the best results using that. Shoot for that 100MB limit (to get the bestest quality) cause youtube recompresses it anyway.

Hi Dylan,
I was impressed by the quality of your wife's clip on youtube, and by the acting for that matter. Could you give us a little more info on the DviX settings you used ?

yep...upload a 100mb divx
hope you have high speed or we'll see you next thursday

I've had pretty good success with these recommended settings:
WMV
Audio 128kbps
Video 320x240, 1 mbps, best quality

Here's a free encoder that does a nice job of encoding from/to many different formats:

http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

i've scoured the youtube website and all that i can find is that they perfer the video to be under 10 minutes and 100 MB.Umm well you can't have scoured that hard because its easy via 'Help' to find this page:
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=55745&topic=10526
so it clearly says what you need to do for best quality.

And the The "prefer video to be under 10mins and 100Mb" is actually a "Must be under 10mins and 100Mb".

You can always try using Google Video. I thought it was unlimited but they told me there is a cap of around 1.5 gigs. Still, 1.5 gigs to most people, is unlimited.