YouTube

You Tube have finally gone wide screen that’s 16:9 format or 1280px by 720px. I personally think its a great improvement since it now cuts down the time it takes for me to prepare video for You Tube. My video cameras shoot in wide screen and I would always have to re-render my 16:9 footage into a 4:3 box which produced letterbox black bars at top and bottom of those clips and also reducing the resolution of the video.

The Test

Today I tried encoding for the new wide screen format and uploaded a few test short clips to figure out what would be the best settings and came up with the following as the one that worked for me.

Using Premiere Pro CS3 I exported my final footage as follows:

Export to Adobe Media Encoder
NTSC
23.976 fps
HDTV 1280px X 720px
H.264 format

I used these bitrate settings as follows:

VBR, 2 Pass
Target Bitrate [Mbps]: 6
Maximum Bitrate [Mbps]: 10

[youtube width=”500″ height=”307″]http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=vUxhg2Q7Ojs[/youtube]

Viewing the video above as an embed you will not see the full effect so heres the link to the clip http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=vUxhg2Q7Ojs

You Tube Wide Screen Embed Code Example

<object width=”500″ height=”307″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/vUxhg2Q7Ojs&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/vUxhg2Q7Ojs&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”500″ height=”307″></embed></object>

The Drawbacks

There are a couple of drawbacks so far, for one the file size in terms of MB are pretty big. My successful wide screen clip weighed in at 24.4MB for a 33.06sec video clip also the widescreen format is only viewable on the YouTube website itself.

Tips/Tricks

I have also discovered that uploading clips to You Tube in the H.264 format (.mp4) will grant you the watch in high quality option. In theory clicking that link will load your video clip at higher quality (&fmt=18) and you will notice better video and audio than standard view, there is now a trick to get even higher quality again by appending &fmt=22 to the end of a You Tube video url this has the effect of loading your video in HD (high definition) and you will really see and hear the benefit of this in full screen mode.

Try these links to test same video but different quality:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUxhg2Q7Ojs (Standard View)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUxhg2Q7Ojs&fmt=18 (High Quality View)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUxhg2Q7Ojs&fmt=22 (HD Super Quality View)

Note*

You need to upload a video file in 1280px X 720px format in order to view in HD using the &fmt=22 trick above.