Let's say you want to make your video file size as small
as possible, while still containing
all the quality that YouTube wants from you,
as well as making it very streamable,
that YouTube can quickly encode and get
it live as soon as possible-- what type of settings
should you use for all that?
That's coming up.
Hey, guys, my name is Tim Schmoyer, and it is Thursday.
Time to do some YouTube q&a with you guys like we do every week.
Ron Buckles wrote and asked this-- your videos will process
faster if you encode into a streamable file format.
How do I encode my videos into a streamable file format?
Good question, Ron.
I will put a link in the description text of this video,
right here on YouTube, that will go to YouTube's page, where
they give you all the recommended bit
rates and resolutions and settings and coating settings,
and everything that you need, to optimize your video when you
render it out and export it, so that it's
as optimized as perfectly as possible for YouTube.
I'm going to show you, on my computer, how
I set these settings before I render out these Video Creators
videos, and all videos that I do.
But, before that, I'm going to just give you
like a real basic summary of what you're looking for.
Basically, in an mp4 video format,
you want the audio to be encoded as AAC,
and you want the codec to be H.264.
The resolution that you export your video as
should be the same resolution that the video was actually
shot in.
So, if you shot in 1080p, then render out that video in 1080p.
And the same thing with frame rates.
If you shot at 24 frames per second,
then export your video, also at 24 frames per second.
If you have control over the bit rate setting,
just give YouTube as much data as you can,
but if you do need to limit it because of your upload
speed and things, like I do, then they say for 1080p video
footage, give them about, like, an eight megabit per second bit
rate.
Or, for 720p, about a five megabit per second bit rate
would be sufficient.
And if you're recording your audio and stereo,
then ideally they want that at a 384 bit rate.
Personally, I bring mine down to 256, because all I'm doing
is just speech.
I don't think there's any reason-- like, you're not
going to notice any difference between 256 and 384,
but 384 is what they ask for, so if you want to get it like,
perfect, you can just go with that.
Where you'll find all these different settings
for rendering your video will be different
depending on what editing software you're using,
and some editing softwares, especially the cheaper ones,
won't even give you access to set some of these.
They'll just tell you, do you want high quality
low quality or like super-high quality?
Or something like that, and you just kind
gotta pick one and go with what it says.
But I am on a Mac, and I am using Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5,
so I'll take you to my computer and show you where I find all
these settings for me.
Here's all last week's video, it's all edited.
Just gonna go to file and then export media, or Command-E,
if you're going with the keyboard shortcut on a Mac.
And, so, I get two views here.
This one-- let me make this a little bigger for you-- this is
what the source looks, which is what my actual timeline here,
and this is what it's going to look like when I export it.
So, same thing, which is exactly what I want.
So, I have it named here, I want to export video and audio.
And, then this is the output, and this is the source.
So the source is what the actual video footage is,
and it's 1080p footage, pixel aspect ratio is one.
And the frame rate is 23.976 frames
per second, which I recommend is probably the best frame
rate to use for getting the most film-like look,
and so that's what I shoot pretty much everything in.
It's also better for low light and settings and things
like that.
Progressive scan, which if you don't what that is,
we don't need to get into here-- is the duration, 48 k-hertz,
and then stereo.
So, basically, when I output it, I
want it to be the exact same setting, so 1080p right
here, same frame rate, progressive scan,
AAC is the audio codec at 256, like I told you.
48 hertz right you're, just like I haven't down here.
And it's in stereo.
Variable bit rate-- and I'll get in all these
in a second-- one pass is how many scans and to take.
And here's the target bit rate and the maximum bit
rate, which I have is set to 12 as the target and eight.
But I could set that down to eight, like I said,
because of it being 1080p.
So, let me show you guys what this
looks like-- let me make this a little bit bigger for you--
so, down here is where I set all the settings, right?
So here, I'm under the video tab--
1920 pixels by 1080-- that's 1080p.
Here's where I can set the frame rate,
but since my photo is just in 23.976, that's
what we're going to keep this one in.
Widescreen-- always upload in widescreen, if you can.
Like, if you're still shooting on something that's still,
like, a square, I definitely recommend
not doing that anymore.
This is-- we don't need to do that-- I don't usually
do that, because it's going to the web,
it's going to re-compress it anyway.
Variable bit rate-- that means it's
going to look at what the bit rate is
in each frame-- like how much data information is in there,
and it's going to analyze it-- like,
how many times do you want it to analyze it?
Again, since we're just going to YouTube,
they're going to re-encode it anyway.
I usually just do one pass.
You could have it do two passes, which will give you a higher
quality, and it's a little bit of a larger file,
but the quality difference for the web,
on that, isn't really that large.
This is constant bit rate, which means, you're telling it,
I don't care, like, what you think
the bit rate is each frame, just always give it
the consistent, constant bit rate.
The variable will mean it will go up and down based
on how much data and information is happening in each frame
and adjust accordingly so you don't get, like,
these super- overinflated video files that are like really big.
Like, this'll just optimize it that way.
Target bit rate-- this is where you want it to focus on.
Since it is a variable, say focus around-- I have it 1080p,
so I'm focusing around 12, but, according to YouTube,
you could drop that to eight.
And then this is the maximum, like,
what do you want it to go up to?
And maybe for something like this,
I put it at like 10 or 11.
That would be the settings that YouTube would give you to use.
So that's all the video settings.
Then I have the audio tab right here.
And, oh, where's the-- I have it set on H.264 as the encoding
format right here-- you know, there's lots of other ones,
but that's the one-- H.264, in an mp4 format-- that's
what YouTube recommends.
OK, the audio-- AAC is what they suggest.
I recorded in stereo, so I'm going to keep it a stereo.
Frequency-- I'm going to keep it at 48.
If you do, you know, 44.1, that's fine, too.
Most people aren't going to-- it's not
going to be a big difference.
Audio quality-- you want it to high.
This is what YouTube said, hey, boost this all the way up.
Basically, they wanted 128 kilobits per second,
per channel, and stereo is two channels-- right and left
channel, whereas mono would be just one channel,
so they would just say 128 total.
Or, if you're doing stereo, two channels,
they say you want two 128 bit rate channels.
And, if you don't know what a bit rate is,
it's basically the amount of information
that's stored in the file, and they want more information.
Which will then lead to higher quality.
For speech, like, all I'm doing is
like-- 256 is totally sufficient, if all you're doing
is just speech.
I mean, even 96 would be sufficient for speech.
128 would be great, so I'm already giving them
way more than they really want.
So 256 is fine, and I want it to be based on the bit rate here.
And, so, you could do some of this other stuff-- maximum
render quality, again, if you're going
for, like, something really high, super-high quality.
But, again, since you're just sending it to the web,
I would recommend just hitting export after this.
And, then those would be all the settings that I use.
And if I want to double-check, you just
make sure that my source and my output
look exactly the same-- that's what I want to see.
I'll give you an example-- like, let's say
I switched it from-- let me put it, like, here-- so,
now I switched it to 480p.
So now this is using a different resolution than my source,
and see you have these black bars at the top.
So, my source doesn't have that, but now my output
does, because I'm not exporting in the right resolution.
So if you have black bars around your videos,
that's-- because now I'm actually exporting a "squarer"
video-- a four by three video, when I'm using a 16 by 9, like,
video frame, and so it adds these black bars to fix it.
So, just keep it on the same thing,
and there's black bars in the output will go away.
Again, guys, if you want to dig into any
of this in more detail, check out
the link-- I'll put in the description text
below this video, on YouTube.
It will take you to YouTube's official recommendation page,
and you can dig into all this a little bit more there.
I'd love to hear from you guys-- comments below if you have
found any particular settings that
help you the most in getting your videos as high quality as
possible onto YouTube without making like a really big file
size or without forcing YouTube to take
a really long time to encode it.
So all those ideas and suggestions
are very much appreciated down there below.
And, if this is something you're trying to figure out right now,
I definitely recommend that you check out
what other people are saying down
there-- always really good, helpful stuff.
And if this is your first time here,
I would love to have you subscribe.
Every Thursday we do a YouTube q&a just like this to help you
guys out.
On Tuesdays, we take a look at some online video news,
talk about the implications that all the updates around YouTube
have for us as creators.
And, then, on Wednesdays, to give you guys
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if those people could just find you and hear
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Subscribe, and I'll see you guys again next week.
Bye.