Basic Training: YouTube - Step by Step

Kyle Cassidy
April 2008

» Next Image Previous Image « Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge

About ten years ago, I was really into the idea of video letters. Many of my friends and family lived in disparate areas of the country, and I always had fun making up videos of my daily routine, editing them down, dubbing them to VHS, sticking them in envelopes, addressing the envelopes and watching them pile up on the table by the door because I hated going to the post office. So envelopes would sit there, unmailed, gathering dust. Then along came the internet to the rescue, with video file-sharing sites like YouTube. Now you can shoot video, edit it and upload it to a central location, where your friends and family (and, if you like, total strangers) can watch it. No postage necessary!

YouTube is actually very simple to use, but very often the most difficult part of the journey is the first step. So this month, we're going to walk you, step-by-step, through publishing video content on the world's most popular video-sharing site.

There are a few simple steps to getting your video from your computer to YouTube. The minds there have worked long and hard to make this as painless a process as possible.

Go to www.youtube.com and click the Sign Up button; it's at the very top of the screen. There are several different types of accounts: Standard, Director, Musician, Comedian and Guru. It doesn't really matter which one you choose, but the Directors' entries ostensibly are expected to be professional edited videos. Videos uploaded from Standard accounts are limited to 10 minutes; the Director videos can be longer.

You'll get an email asking you to confirm your registration, and then you're in.

YouTube will accept most popular video formats: AVI, MOV, MPG and WMV. The format that YouTube uses directly is MPEG-4 at 320x240, 30fps, with 64k MP3 mono audio.

Yes. We're talking about internet bandwidths here and bit rates comfortable for people on dial-ups. If people want to see your video in HDV, you're looking for another venue. What YouTube and others like it give you is easy access by a lot of people. Video quality is the trade you make. It's a trade that's been trending that way starting with the low-cost (and low-quality) VCD format being extremely popular in Asia, and more and more people watching movies on their laptops, iPods and other portable devices. At the moment, 320x240 is where a significant part of the viewing population is.

• Digg This!
• del.icio.us
• Technorati
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit