A lot of people ask me about the best format for their videos to be the highest quality on YouTube. This has changed a lot over the last year, as YouTube has introduced HQ videos, and now 16×9 HD videos on YouTube.

But YouTube has also since released a relatively helpful section in their help center about how to optimize your videos for YouTube. They leave some holes, though, and I’ll try to fill them here.

Recommended Resolution

What sort of resolution does YouTube recommend for the highest quality? Well, their HD is based on 720, the minimum for HD. So your videos should either be: 1280×720 for widescreen format, or for high quality SD 640×480 or higher is still recommended.

If you have your video in a higher resolution, YouTube will just re-encode it into a 720 — but — the less times you encode the video the higher the quality will be sustained. So don’t re-encode your video into 720 just to get it to YouTube quicker. Let them do the work, so you don’t lose quality.

Bit Rate and Frame Rate

On bit rate, YouTube doesn’t give any suggestions. They say “Because bit-rate is highly dependent on codec there is no recommended or minimum value.” Which is true, but I’ll give you what’s worked best for me and others I know. Anything over 3Mbps has worked well, although it’s best to upload it’s original. If you do need to edit and re-encode, I’ve used 3Mbps video in WMV format and that always works very well.

On frame rate, YouTube does have some suggestions.

The video frame-rate should be the same as the original where possible – up-sampling from a 24fps original can cause judder artifacts for example. For film sources a 24 fps or 25 fps progressive master yields the best results while videos that have had a re-sampling transfer process applied – such as Telecine pulldown – often result in a lower quality video.

I have always used 29.97 without any problems, but just as long as your video looks fine when it comes out the other side of your encoding.

Codec

As I mentioned before, I use WMV for all my videos — I get the cleanest videos at the smallest file sizes. I have tried MPG and MPG4 without much success, it tends to lose a lot more quality, but YouTube does prefer it. They also prefer H.264, which is native to many HD cameras (like the Creative Vado HD) but I haven’t been able to edit and re-encode it in that same format.

Aspect Ratio

If you want true HD, it will need to be 1280×720 for a 16×9 aspect ratio. This is what YouTube recommends. You will need to make sure that when you encode the video file, it remains in a 16×9 aspect ratio. Take a look:

16x9 original 1280x720 is what YouTube likes

The standard definition aspect ratio is 4:3 — if you have a high def video, do not encode in this ratio! But if your video is not widescreen, this is native HQ for YouTube. See below:

Follow those guidelines, otherwise your video will come out in 4:3 aspect ratio when you meant for it to be widescreen 16:9, and it will look like this on YouTube:

Don’t let wrong Aspect Ratio happen to you!

test, Test, TEST!

There’s no redo on YouTube, once you upload it to YouTube and you see it’s wrong, your only option is to delete it and start over.

Final Thoughts…

My final thoughts… you HAVE to see this video called “How to make your YouTube video 720p HD widescreen (and keeping it that way!)” — it’s awesome!

William Bryant
http://twitter.com/wbryant

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