Optimizing Video for YouTube

The Problem

I have a new strategy for optimizing video for YouTube. It's a two-stage process but results in movies that are tiny in terms of file size but look great online and stream effortlessly.

For some time now I've been trying to take into account YouTube's own guidelines for compression from Final Cut Pro (FCP). The resulting files were bloated and with our low-bandwidth "broadband" connection would have meant hours of upload time as well as aborted uploads.

The New Strategy

Recently I started to edit some old footage taken with the Canon XL-1 camera. It's standard definition footage (SD 720x576 pixels) but looks fine when exported from FCP at 1024x768 pixels. When I export I choose NO COMPRESSION. This results in a massive file, of course. The example here, Torre Archirafi at Sunrise, has a duration of 2:14 and the uncompressed export from FCP weighed in at 7.39 GB and a data rate of 473.82 Mbits/s. No worries!

The next step is to open the beast in QuickTime Pro and to export "Movie to MPEG4". Now click on the Options button and choose H264 compression, optimized for streaming, and keyframe "automatic". In this example, the resulting exported file was only 28.82 MB with a data rate of just 1686 kbits/s. And it looks great, even after YouTube have mucked about with it.

Pechakucha

I was recently commissioned to make a movie from a PowerPoint presentation. I'm no big fan of PowerPoint, but the client was Dark Angels, whose website I designed and continue to maintain, and I knew there'd be more to this than met the eye. The title was "Pechakucha", which meant nothing to me at the time so I searched for the term online.

Pechakucha (or Pecha Kucha), meaning "chit chat" in Japanese, is actually a method of presentation developed by two Tokyo-based architects, Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein. You take 20 slides, let each slide run for 20 seconds, and you have a presentation lasting 6 minutes 40 seconds. I've attended much longer presentations. Some were tedious in the extreme, while others have expected me to read lots of text whilst trying to follow the narration, which I've often found exhausting.

The Pechakucha method is a great discipline. Only use your 20 best/most relevant slides and keep your narration short and to the point. Practice and rewrite until you have a punchy and entertaining presentation. I would also recommend the method as a means of showing off holiday snaps. You could easily make a wee holiday movie to upload to YouTube, for example, using only your best 20 snaps.

Here John Simmons presents a superb example of the form. Enjoy!