The Beginner's Corner: Putting Video on YouTube

by Emily Price
Published on Jul 24, 2007 8:55 AM



I recorded a few short videos using my MiniDV camcorder and want to upload them to YouTube and email them to a few friends. This is my first camcorder, so I'm not sure what to do. What do I need to do to get video from my camcorder to the web?
Karen

This is a wonderful question Karen. The internet is becoming a great place to quickly share your videos with the world. Before you can get to sharing your digital masterpiece there are a few things you need to do to get your video internet ready.
  • Upload the video to a video editing system
    The easiest way to get your video on the web is to first upload them into your video editor. The shorter your video is the faster people will be able to access it, so you’ll want to edit out an extra extraneous video. In the case of online video, editing not only will make your video look better, but shorter video will load better. YouTube also limits you to 10 minutes per video clip, so if your video is longer you will need to cut it down or upload it in several different parts.

  • Choose a format
    There are a couple of different video format options for internet video. The major ones are Real, Windows Media, and Quicktime. YouTube will accept .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG file formats. If you’re not sure what format to choose then Quicktime is usually a good choice for emailing to friends. Quicktime is supported by PC’s and Macs and is widely used by both users so you won’t run into compatibility issues with friends who use different computers.

  • Compress and export your video
    The more you compress your video the faster it will load on a users computer. On the other hand, the more you compress your video, the worse the video will look quality wise. The best plan of action is to experiment with different film quality sizes until you find one that suits you. If you were going to upload your video to your own personal website then you might want to offer a few different quality options for users. For people with a slow connection you may want to offer a highly compressed file. For users with a faster connection you can offer a larger file. YouTube automatically coverts your video to the format needed for their site, but you are limited to 100MB for your file, so you will have to do some compressing beforehand if you have a longer video.
 
Once you determine how much you want to compress your video and what format you want to put the video in then you’re ready to export your video clip.  I usually just export my video to my desktop so I can find it pretty easily. If you’re going to be doing a lot of videos, or want to keep them in internet form on your hard drive then you may want to start a folder on your computer to store video.
Once you get your video exported in its new compressed form then uploading it to YouTube and emailing it to friends is a snap.
  • Upload your video to YouTube
    In order to upload a video to YouTube you will first need to set up a free account and confirm your email address. You can set your video up to be public (so everyone in the world can check it out) or private (so you can limit who can see it). After entering in a little information about your video uploading it is as simple as selecting the file on your computer and uploading it to the site.

  • Emailing Video
    Several email programs limit users attachments to sizes around 2MB. Check with your email provider to determine what your maximum upload size will be. If you have a longer video it may be better to just upload the video to YouTube and send a link to the video to friends rather than try to upload and send a large file (which could take a VERY long time). If you must email you want to use a highly compressed low quality file to keep the file size down so your recipient can download the video easily.

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Emily Price works in professional broadcast and is a blogger for CamcorderInfo.com. Got a question for Emily? Send it here.