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You don't need to spend to much time on YouTube to realize that all videos are not created equal. There is a marked contrast between the grainy, poorly shot cat movies your aunt uploads and the much better looking submissions that rank at the top of YouTube's most popular.
While grain and noise are factors largely due to camera and lens quality, pixilation and distorted video is often the result of poor compression choices.
There are dozens of video editing software packages on the market ranging from the free packages Apple's "iMovie"<http://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie/> or "Windows Movie Maker"<http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/moviemaker.mspx> to the high end apps like Apple's "Final Cut Pro"<http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/finalcutpro/>or "Adobe Premiere"<http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/>.
While the big boys offer impressive options like sharpening overlays and gamma correction, for most user's there's no need to drop over $500 on software just for YouTube.
Most of the quality problems in YouTube stem from the fact that YouTube not only compresses your movie, but also converts it to an entirely different format (the FLV format for the YouTube Flash player).
So how to make your videos sharper and clearer?
YouTube "recommends"<http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=55745&topic=10526> that you encode your movie in MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format, shrink it to 320x240 resolution, use MP3 audio, and 30 frames per second
While these suggestions are dead simple and fine for the aunt's cat movie, it's possible to get much better results by ignoring some of them.
First off, the 320x240 pixel dimensions are not a good idea since YouTube's player actually has a broadcast size of 425 x 318. What YouTube does is upscale your movie to fit the full player, which is one way that the quality is degraded.
If you happen to be shooting at larger than 425 x 318 anyway (and unless you're using a cellphone, you probably are), there's no need to shrink your movie just to have YouTube enlarge it again. Set your editing software to export at 425 x 318 to begin with. The only downside is that your upload time will likely increase somewhat since your files will be bigger.
Obviously both of the these dimensions are for 4:3 ratio videos. If you're shooting in 16:9 you'll have to either crop your movie or letterbox it. Thus far YouTube doesn't offer a 16:9 player.
Note that iMovie '08 features a one-click export to YouTube feature which offers to publish to either 480X360 or 640X480. We would suggest the larger if you have the bandwidth to spare. When uploading to YouTube iMovie 08 will automatically use H.264 at 30 fps.
The other questionable aspect of YouTube's advice is the Divx and Xvid CODECs. If you happen to be on the Apple platform you may as well use the MPEG-4 part 10 (H.264). All of Apple's video editing applications support it and YouTube can still convert it to FLV.
In fact the YouTube movies you watch on AppleTV and the iPhone is broadcast in H.264 and Adobe recently announced that future versions of the Flash Player will support H.264, which means at some point this will likely become the default format of choice.
Another possibility is the PhotoJPEG CODEC. For more on why you might want to use PhotoJPEG and some more tips on optimizing movies for YouTube using Final Cut Pro, have a look at "Brian Gary's tutorial"<http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/youtube_compressor_gary.html>.
If your video software supports it, enable a little bit of sharpening and color correction since FLV compression tends to make edges go a bit soft. You'll need to play with your setting to find the right amount of sharpening, but don't be afraid to overdo it, in fact, you're essentially trying to overdo it and then letting the YouTube's encoder blur things back to normal.
Depending on the quality of your video editing tools there may be more options at your disposal, check the forums for your software package to see what others recommend tweaking for maximum sharpness.
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