Ok so, youre posting videos on YouTube and they look well they look like junk. Youre wondering what the heck is going on and how the heck to fix it, right? Well thats where we come in. This article will give you some quick tips and tricks to getting the best quality you can out of YouTube until they change the how and what of their service to allow for better videos or HD content.

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

Resolution ” YouTube display in a fairly specific resolution and to help their compression utilities get your video up with the minimum of loss of quality you need to match your video up to their resolution. Since they’re using 720p now, which means you should have 1280×720 pixel resolution you need to set your video resolution accordingly. This will cut down on compression time and give you a better idea of what your video will look like in the end. Its not so bad really. The resolution is HD and that means that you can get a real HD experience out of YouTube.

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.

While youre thinking about the other things youve also got to think about several more things, audio is one of them. You need to have this in MP3 or AAC (44.1KHz Stereo ideally) on the track or you risk losing quality during compression and conversion. Your best bet is to set this to CBR of VBR if you have the option. Framerate is another thing you should pay attention to. To keep thinks flowing smoothly youve got to maintain a minimum of 30+ FPS or frames per second. The file format you need to have your stuff in is .mov or .mp4. If your video editing package cant handle that then youre going to want to look into one that can. Quicktime Pro is often touted as the ideal since its both cheap and handles a wide variety of video formats.

Now that youve got that all set, save your file and upload to YouTube. Having set many of your settings at or better than YouTube you are making it a touch easier for them to compress. So wait until its done and voila! You have got yourself a good looking YouTube Video.