If you’re like millions of others around the world you’ve been to and even uploaded videos to YouTube. But then you had all sorts of problems getting your files to show properly or look good or a hundred other things. So here is a quick how-to that will help you optimize your video for YouTube You need to make sure that when you save your video for YouTube that you do so in a format that is not only compatible with YouTube buy will display properly when streamed back through the web to your viewers.

There are several variables that you yourself can control prior to uploading the video to the service. Of these the most important are outlined below.

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.

While youre thinking about the other things youve also got to think about several more things, audio is one of them. You need to have this in MP3 or AAC (44.1KHz Stereo ideally) on the track or you risk losing quality during compression and conversion. Your best bet is to set this to CBR of VBR if you have the option. Framerate is another thing you should pay attention to. To keep thinks flowing smoothly youve got to maintain a minimum of 30+ FPS or frames per second. The file format you need to have your stuff in is .mov or .mp4. If your video editing package cant handle that then youre going to want to look into one that can. Quicktime Pro is often touted as the ideal since its both cheap and handles a wide variety of video formats.

Now that youve got that all set, save your file and upload to YouTube. Having set many of your settings at or better than YouTube you are making it a touch easier for them to compress. So wait until its done and voila! You have got yourself a good looking YouTube Video.