You know youve done it. Youre part of the YouTube generation and youve not only watched videos but uploaded them as well. Once you did that though you realized the quality of your video just sucked. You tried a variety of things and still arent happy with the quality.

In the meantime, read through this article and youll get some better looking videos in the long run.

Resolution ” Taking a video at a resolution too small for YouTube means that when it goes into the service it will need to be stretched. This is a surefire way to lose most if not all of the quality of a video and even may make it unwatchable. Your best bet for a safe resolution is the recommended YouTube size of 1280×720, also known as 720. Now youre all gasping because you can get HD quality. It will make for a large file but YouTube can handle up to 1GB files as long as theyre not more than 10 minutes (actually 10:59).

Bitrate ” This is how much data is processed per second when your video is being created or saved. Whenever possible you want this to be as high of a number as you can get. Generally youd like it to be in the range of 6Mbps and 8Mbps. Thats so much data so that when your video goes through the YouTube compressor online, even though there might be a loss of quality, it will still retain enough to look good as it gets popped out the other side. This will make for large file sizes as well so be aware of that.

What else can you do to help YouTube make your video the best it can be? Well you can make sure your audio tracks are set to MP3 or AAC encoding (44.1KHz Stereo) for one. Another thing you can do is make sure the file format is H.264, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 format because quite simply, YouTube doesnt really like much else. You can get yourself a video editor that handles multiple formats to help you with all of this and so that you can convert and edit as you need. You neednt pay a lot for one, even Quicktime Pro is only $30. Finally you can keep your video file above 30 frames per second and this will help reduce jitter after the compression process.

Once youve got all this, upload your video, wait for YouTube to process it and you should a nice looking video pushed out to the site for your friends, family and complete strangers. Good Luck in your video marketing efforts.

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