Prep Your Videos to Share
So, little Suzie had her big recital, and you brought the new camcorder and tripod, enduring “Who does this guy think he is, Spielberg?” stares from other parents (and likely your spouse). Now it’s time for your big reward: You get to show the world the gorgeous new video of your future American Idol winner. You finish up the basic video editing, adjusting color, cutting dead air, making transitions if you’re into that sort of thing. But the world isn’t waiting for you to send it DVD copies, leaving you to wonder, “How the heck do I get this to all her adoring fans?”
To get your video into shape for iPod and YouTube distribution, start in your video-editing program. I used Adobe Premiere Elements in the directions below; it’s our reigning Editors’ Choice among consumer video-editing apps.
1 Preset
The simple solution to getting video ready for iPod or Zune play is to find a preset. Adobe Premiere Elements has a convenient preset for the iPod that will also work for Zune and other players. Don’t rely solely on the preset. Check the results and tweak as necessary.
2 Check
Once the program has produced the file, review any fast-moving segments in your video to see if there are any “slicing”-type artifacts, like those shown at far left. These result when you encode video from interlaced sources such as most DV and HDV camcorders.
3 Correct
In Premiere Elements, you can fix this problem by rightclicking on the timeline, choosing Field Options, and checking Always Deinterlace (near right). In other tools, search for the term “deinterlace” in the help file; follow the instructions there. If your editor can’t eliminate these artifacts, use another encoding tool like ArcSoft MediaConverter (far right), which works in near real time when paired with ADS Tech’s Instant Video To-Go encoding accelerator. — next: Prepping For YouTube
What about YouTube? Well, there’s a short, easy answer that gets you 90 percent of the way there from a quality perspective, and a longer answer that might grab you the remaining 10 percent.
The short answer is, output the video from your editor using the iPod preset discussed above (and inspecting for interlacing issues), then increase the data rate as far as possible without exceeding a total file size of 100MB. As long as the resulting file is under 100MB and less than 10 minutes, it will be at the desired target resolution and frame rate, in a high-quality format YouTube can process.
The longer answer involves understanding some principles about how YouTube encodes, and about good encoding practices in general.
1 Resolution
YouTube delivers all videos at 320-by-240 resolution, so you should scale to that resolution before uploading. In particular, don’t upload full resolution (720-by-480) MPEG-2 files because YouTube does a poor job of managing the differences in display aspect ratio between a television and a computer screen—hence the black bars on the top and bottom of the video here.
2 Quality
Since YouTube re-encodes all uploaded videos, you should give the site the highest-quality file possible to work with. Encoding to iPod format is a good start, but that limits you to a video data rate of 750 kilobits per second. If your encoding tool lets you, start with the iPod preset, then increase the data rate as much as possible without exceeding 100MB. Also consider reducing the frame rate of your video file to 15 frames per second before uploading, which can enhance quality. You can boost color saturation slightly in your editor to counteract fading. Finally, if you have high-quality tools around, use them. On my tests, Adobe After Effects produced a noticeably sharper file with less aliasing (aka “the jaggies”) than any other tested program.
Tags: adobe reader, american_idol_winner, apps, camcorder, editors_choice, ipod, little_suzie, reward, shape, Software, spielberg, stares, transitions, video_editing_program, youtube
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