Sunday, February 1, 2009

Youtube Video Marketing Tips - Optimize Your Videos for Youtube

By Marcus Richard

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.

In the meantime, read through this article and youll get some better looking videos in the long run.

Resolution " Taking a video at a resolution too small for YouTube means that when it goes into the service it will need to be stretched. This is a surefire way to lose most if not all of the quality of a video and even may make it unwatchable. Your best bet for a safe resolution is the recommended YouTube size of 1280x720, also known as 720. Now youre all gasping because you can get HD quality. It will make for a large file but YouTube can handle up to 1GB files as long as theyre not more than 10 minutes (actually 10:59).

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.

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. - 16755

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