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Of course, even with all that said, YouTube still has the trump card - sheer overwhelming mass popularity. Quite simply if you want your video to be seen, YouTube is still the number one place to put it. Virtually every other video hosting service provides a better user experience and better quality with more creator control, but YouTube has the crowd of surfers ready to stumble onto your video - a weight of numbers no one else can match.
I have little doubt that in the near future YouTube's dominance will quickly wane and ever more sophisticated and discerning users will turn to the richer experience and processes offered by some of the YouTube alternatives. But in the meantime, the craft of the video maker is that most empowering of skills; adaptation. How do you get the best results from YouTube? How do you ensure your video looks as good as YouTube will allow?
If you don?t have the capability to encode FLV directly, YouTube's own suggestion of DivX has merit. DivX is essentially an implementation of MPEG-4 and does certainly provide excellent quality playback. But DivX's particular strength is long form encoding at data rates lower than DVD MPEG-2 to achieve the same DVD-quality. DivX is thus excellent for encoding feature films down to more manageable sizes but doesn't do as well for much shorter, smaller, and lower bandwidth projects.
The other often cited format for YouTube upload is AVC/h.264 using the MP4 format. AVC is a superb codec allowing DVD quality at 3 to 4mbps which is half the bitrate of MPEG DVD's usual of 6 to 8mbps. AVC at high bitrates (15-30mbps) is also highly viable for acquisition and is the basis for AVCHD and Panasonic's AVC-Intra format used in their P2 cameras. But as with DivX, AVC does not do as well at very, very low data rates. The structure of AVC/h.264 (which is also a variation of MPEG-4) is also not very robust when heavily compressed from one low bitrate to another as YouTube will do in transcoding to FLV.
From here there are a range of formats that are profoundly unsuitable. MPEG-2 is just not efficient enough to get in under 100MB unless your video is extremely short. QuickTime's MPEG-4 can work well but does carry the same potential issues of DivX. QuickTime Sorenson is virtually outdated now and has massive quality loss.
With much experimentation, there is an argument that points toward Windows Media Video (WMV) as a format of choice for YouTube upload if you're unable to create FLV itself. WMV (which is the same engine as VC1 used in HD-DVD) is an extremely efficient compression scheme allowing for great file size reduction but it?s also, more importantly, a very robust compression structure at modest bitrates. What this means is that WMV can hold up rather well when re-encoded to FLV by YouTube's servers, in many cases more so than MPEG-4 -based codecs such as AVC/h.264 and DivX.
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| Some consider Windows Media Video as the format of choice for uploading to YouTube. |
Matching the YouTube specs of 320x240 in frame size you then simply have to specify the bitrate of your WMV encode. For a video of 5-10 minutes, a bitrate of between 3mbps and 5mbps will give an excellent high quality video less than 100MB in size and which, when passed through YouTube's Flash video server-side encoder to 200kbps will still look very respectable. This is of course assuming that the source footage was good. Always shoot HD if you can because scaling down res makes the image data more dense and a richer sharper picture as a result.
YouTube arguably has flaws in its model of delivery. They're not flaws that are a major hurdle to average-Joe users but for more professional video makers wishing to leverage the YouTube audience, they do limit the quality of the visual experience you're able to present. But with its overwhelming popularity and near ubiquitous presence in popular media, it?s not a medium you can ignore. Learning to work with its faults is the way to make YouTube work for you.
Mike Jones is a digital media producer, author, educator from Sydney, Australia. He has a diverse background across all areas of media production including film, video, TV, journalism, photography, music and on-line projects. Mike is the author of three books and more than 200 published essays, articles and reviews covering all aspects of cinematic form, technology and culture. Mike is currently Head of Technological Arts at the International Film School Sydney (www.ifss.edu.au), has an online home at www.mikejones.net and can be found profusely blogging for DMN at www.digitalbasin.net
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