[TYPING]
Hey, guys.
My name is Tim Schmoyer and it's Thursday.
Time to do some YouTube Q&A with you guys
where every week I just take a question that you guys ask
of me and I do my best to answer it.
If you have a question that you think
I can help you with in an upcoming video sometime,
you could leave it as a comment below this video.
Or even better yet, send a video of yourself
asking me your question and I'd love to put you right here.
The link to submit that video is in the description
text below this video here on YouTube so go check that out.
Today, we're going to talk about making
videos look awesome on YouTube.
Joe Dexter asks this.
Hey, Tim.
I think a lot of your viewers would love an episode about how
to get their videos looking HD even though it's
in YouTube's default 360p setting.
I'm sure everyone has noticed how some YouTuber's vids look
great even in 360 and some others look pixelated.
Yeah, so Joe, there's two different things
that go into really making your videos look the best as they
can here on YouTube.
And the first is what you shoot it with.
Your camera, obviously, makes a big difference.
If you shoot it on a really junky-looking camera,
no amount of editing and tweaking
is going to replace and create pixels
that don't exist in your original frame
and make that look awesome on YouTube.
Right now, I am just shooting on my iPhone
because it's super convenient and it serves my purposes
well for what I'm doing here.
But if I were going to shoot on my DSLR here,
this would give you a really nice shallow depth of field
and be much higher quality than this camera is.
So I would say use the camera that
works for your purposes and your intentions.
You don't have to go all out.
Not everyone needs a DSLR.
Some people can get away with just
using their iPhone or a flip camera or something like that.
The other thing that goes into making your videos look really
good here on YouTube are the export settings
you use when rendering out your project from your editing
software after you've completed chopping it all up
and making it look exactly the way you want it.
I'll put a link in the description text
below this video that will take you to YouTube's help
article that outlines in detail the exact specs
that you should be using when you export your video.
But basically, you want to use an MP4 file format and an H.264
Codec, and you want to export your video
using a high enough bitrate that you preserve
as much detail in your image as possible.
If you don't know what a bitrate is,
basically, that is the amount of information
that each frame in your video contains.
The higher the bitrate, the more information, the more detail,
but the higher you set the bitrate,
the larger your file size will be.
So it's not really beneficial to set your bitrate
to be any higher than the bitrate your photos were
actually recorded at, which if you're using a little bit more
of an advanced editor you can usually find that
by just looking at the properties of each clip
and it will tell you what the data rate is right there.
Whatever bitrate your photos were recorded at it's usually
a good idea just to export it around that same bitrate.
Now, they will down encode it as well.
I found that videos at 1080p on YouTube
are somewhere around 8 megabits per second.
Videos at 720p are around 5 megabits per second.
So just give YouTube plenty of head room
to have as much information as they can to really make
it look as crisp and as sharp and as clear here on YouTube
as possible.
Now, there is actually one other thing
I forgot about in the beginning that does also contribute
to how well your video looks here on YouTube
and that is some of the filters and color correction
that you can use.
Most cameras do a half decent job at image reproduction,
but none of them do it perfectly.
Well, even on my DSLR camera I they usually
have to spend some time just color correcting things a bit.
Upping the contrast, maybe oversaturating
some of the elements, adding little vignettes.
Just some of those subtle things that you would never
really pick out if you're just looking at the video
and consuming it as a consumer, but if you were actually
an editor like me and some other people
that you could say, oh, that's what they did.
They can see how they just made the image a little bit more
warm or maybe cooled it off for different effects.
I don't do that to these videos right here.
What you see is just directly off my iPhone so what you see
is what you get.
I don't really think that I need to put a lot of time
into color correcting these.
I do degrain it, however, because by default, the image
from the iPhone is pretty grainy, especially
where I am right now in my basement
and it's low light so I do use a filter that will take away
a lot of that pixelation and just make that crisp and clear.
For example, this is what it looks
like without that filter applied.
And now here's what it looks like with the filter applied.
A very subtle difference.
You probably don't even notice it if I wasn't using it,
but if you compare it side by side,
you'll notice that this is a slightly better image right
here than this image is right here.
Oh, and I just thought of a fourth one actually.
It's not just the camera you use, but it's how you use it.
You need to have plenty of light.
Is there a lot of noise and distractions in the background?
Is the camera jiggly?
The more jiggly it is, the more pixelation that you'll get.
I'm sure that there's other things I've left out
that really contribute to a really solid-looking image
for your videos here on YouTube.
I would love to hear from you guys what they are.
Comment below.
Tell me what I missed, what is also important,
and if you have any tricks or tips or things that you've
learned that really help boost the quality of your image
here on YouTube, please comment with those below as well.
And the rest of you guys, go check out
everyone who's commenting down there because there's usually--
almost every video-- someone who's saying stuff that I've
never heard before, that really blows my mind, that really
helps me out.
So thank you guys for contributing
to my video efforts here as well.
If this is your first time hanging out with us,
I'd love to have you subscribe.
Every week we do these YouTube Q&As with you guys just like
this one on Thursdays.
And then on Tuesdays, we take a look at online video
and what happened in the week before in the online video
news, and we talk about what implications
it has for the content we create, the audiences we're
developing, and what we're doing here on YouTube.
On Wednesdays, we just give you guys some YouTube tips, ideas,
suggestions, advice, things that really help you guys if you
have a message to really help you guys communicate
it and spread it as far and as effectively
as you can here on YouTube.
So thanks for hanging out.
Subscribe and I will see you guys again next week.
See you.
Bye.