Let’s say you are going to be in New England making movies amidst the fall color next week . . Nice, right?
Wouldn’t it be great if that video could actually look good on You Tube - instead of how it normally does?
Below, one set of Hollywood cinema experts share their settings.
If you were at the “Web Video is not TV” workshop last week at the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association you would have learned about better video hosting options and QT settings to use for people who don’t enjoy a 100 MB upload limit or poorly compressed video. (You Tube’s limitation)
At PNA, we discussed what makes a go of good video playback on Blip and Brightcove, but first let us try to see if we can improve for the old You Tube.
The LA Final Cut Pro Users Group has a tutorial.
If your boss demands to see it on You Tube these Quicktime compression settings are supposed to you get the most of your crisp High-Def clips without cringing. Let’s give it a test drive.
Couple of key thoughts here from the LA filmmakers. Don’t make your output size any larger than 320 wide and use the highest data rate to get your file as close to the 100 MB limit as possible. That means a new workflow for a lot of us who have been used to “setting it 480 and forgettting it” . . let us see if it is worth it.
Here are their settings.
General Purpose Settings - Video up to 6 minutes in length
- H.264 video codec set to 2000Kbits/sec (2Mbits/sec or 250KBytes/sec)
- 320×240 video size (deinterlaced or simply use one field)
- Mono audio with AAC codec at 64 Kbit/sec (or 128 Kbit/sec for stereo)
- Recommended Sample Rate
- Best Encoding Quality
In the “Video Options” select Main Profile and Best Quality (Multi-pass).
These settings will be fine up to 800 Mbits aka 100 MBytes.
At the proposed settings, any file shorter than 6 minutes and 15 seconds will be within YouTube’s 100MB per upload limit.
To calculate the ideal setting for videos longer than this, visit the LA FCP group Web site.
BEFORE
This version was output last year using the QT PRo preset “Save as . . . Movie for iPod.”
it made a 5.5 MB .m4v file.
AFTER
This version was saved today using high data rate settings out of QT PRO.
The file size is 14 MB.
Hmm. I respect their thinking, but I just have to ask . . . How does that quality compare to a 4.7 MB version of the file (output at my usual 480 pixels wide/650k data rate) dropped on . . .
Blip.tv
Yep. That’s what I thought.
