Preparing HD Videos for YouTube - How To

Now that YouTube has made the switch to 720p High Definition videos, everyone has been wanting to put up their best in full quality. But how do you go about preparing a video so that YouTube accepts it as HD and gives the Play in HD option at the bottom of the video?

In this tutorial, I’ll go through step by step on how to convert, prepare, and upload your videos using completely free and open source programs. They contain absolutely no spyware or viruses and the developers of these even encourage people to edit and improve the software.

Here is a video that I did, using the following steps. You can see how great the results are:

So, let’s start with the basics. Let’s say that you just exported a video from Premiere, Vegas, iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, or any other video editing software as a raw AVI. I recommend exporting it as a lossless video format, if your software supports it. If not, I recommend using DV-AVI or MPEG2 at a high bit rate (>10mb/s) as the option to export. It is important to export the very best video quality as possible, because the quality will only get worse as you convert it more. As always, garbage in, garbage out.  It’s now time to get that exported .AVI, .MP4, or .WMV ready to be converted to YouTube’s standards.

As I mentioned in my previous post, YouTube recommends the following settings for your video:

Resolution: 1280 x 720 (16 x 9HD) or 640 x 480 (4:3 SD)*
*Square Pixel Ratio
Frame Rate: Should be the Same As Your Source Video (Such as 29.97fps, 24fps, etc NTSC or 25fps, etc for PAL)
Codec: H.264, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 preferred.
Audio Codec: MP3 or AAC preferred
Audio Sample Rate: 44.1kHz
Audio Channels: 2 (stereo)

You’ll need to install the following two pieces of software in order to convert your video to match the above specifications. Both are freeware and open source programs:

• MeGUI

• AVI Synth
  

In addition, if you get an error message when running either of them, you may need Microsoft .NET Framework.

First, install AVI Synth. All you have to do is click on the .exe and install it with the default configuration. Next, install MeGUI. When you first run MeGUI, a window will pop up that says, “New Updates Are Available to Download.” Make sure that you click yes and update it, as bugs are always fixed. Then, restart MeGUI:

In addition, a list may come up of presets that you can import. I would recommend importing all of the presets (check all of the boxes), as we’ll be using a preset to help us create this video.

Now, before you get angry and think, “Where is the h.264 option at?” let me explain what we’ll be converting to. x264 is simply an open source version of h.264, according to Wikipedia, and it will count as an h264 file when uploaded to YouTube.

Create a Script File:

So now we have to load our movie and create an AVI Synth script. Luckily, MeGUI gives us an easy tool to use to create it. Go to where it says Tools, then click on AVS Script Creator. This will allow you to create a script to make it easy to set up to encode.

Next, go to where it says Video Input and click on the box. Navigate to where your video is and load it up.

After your video is loaded, a preview window will open. Here you can see what your video will look like. If it’s completely artifacted, it means that AVI Synth is not recognizing the codec that you used. (If you’re trying to open an mpg video, use the D2V Creator, under Tools, to open it, hit queue, start it, then the AVI Synth screen should open.) Now, go to where it says resize, and be sure that the height is set to 720. If your video is in 1080p, you’ll probably have to resize it to make it fit down to 720 pixels in height. Remember to always keep the ratio between height and width the same!

You may also have to cut out black boarders by using the crop tool. Just keep the video preview window open as you do this, so that way you can see how much that you need to cut out. You may also have to experiment with the pixel ratio, because on mine it reported the video as PAL instead of NTSC, which created vertical stretching. Just use that video preview window (and make sure the check box is checked for it) to see how it looks as you change the options. This is certainly the most challenging part of it.

Remember, even if your height is different than 1280, YouTube will center your movie appropriately. The idea is to make sure your video is 720 in height. In addition, you can go to the filters tab, and click analysis which will help in determining video specs. After you’re finished, click Save and then if it’s not selected already, on the MeGUI main screen, go to where it says open AVS, and select the file you just made.

Now go to tools once again, and click on Bit Rate Calculator.

In the bit rate calculator screen, you can configure how large the final file is going to be, based on the time, average bit rate, and amount of frames per second. Just enter in the length of your clip (mine was 1min and 30sec) and click the radio button that says, “Average Bit Rate” and set that anywhere between 2000 kbit/s to 6000 kbit/s, which is good enough for 720p video. It comes down to how large you want your final file to be. For audio I usually just do 320kps. The calculator will estimate how large your final file will be, and with YouTube’s 10min limit, the largest file you’ll create should be under 200MB.

But wait, YouTube allows 1GB file uploads!

Yes, you could set the bit rate higher than that, but do you really want it to take 10 hours to upload? The beauty of the new h.264 codec is how you can get excellent quality for a small file size!

So now click apply in the bit rate calculator and MeGUI will ask if you want to apply this to your video settings. Click yes. Now you should be back on the main MeGUI screen.

Selecting the Video Encoder Settings

There are a lot of settings that can be changed here. But let’s keep it simple. Hopefully you loaded up the profile presets. The one I usually choose is named, “x264 Unrestricted 2 Pass Insane.” This will scan your video twice, insuring that all of the motion is handled properly. In addition, the bit rate should be already in there if you applied it from the bit rate calculator.

However, the insane setting will make it take a long time to convert your video (it took 5 hours for my one and a half minute long clip) which isn’t ideal if you’re in a rush. You could also select the x264 Fast Mode or Balanced Mode if you don’t mind losing a little quality. Just be sure that it does an auto two pass in the options, as shown in the picture, with your bit rate in there.

Click OK and you should be back to the MeGUI main screen. Now under the video area where it says file format, select MP4 as your container.

Selecting the Audio Encoder Settings

YouTube accepts both MP3 and AAC. You could use AAC, but it would involve even more steps of installing Nero’s AAC encoder and such. So let’s stick to MP3, which uses the LAME encoder, which is by far the best for MP3s. First, select the audio source, which is just going to be the same as the video you chose in the AVI Synth screen. Then, select LAME MP3 Scratchpad and set it up with 320kbit/s audio - CBR, like I did:

*Note: Sometimes you may need to check Force Decoding via Direct Show if you get an error when encoding it later on!

Add the Project to the Queue:

The queue is like a batch tool. This means you can set up multiple videos, add them to the queue, and then before you go to bed at night you can launch the queue and it will do each video, one at a time until all of them are done. So now let’s add our video to the queue by clicking the Auto Encode button at the bottom. The nice thing about Auto Encode is MeGUI will encode both the video and audio, and mux the two together on its own.

Configure the Automatic Encoding screen so that the container is MP4, and under Size and Bitrate, make the sure the No Target Size (use profile settings) is checked, then click Queue.

Now all that’s left is to go to the Queue tab in the main MeGUI screen, then click Start and MeGUI will process the video and save it to the folder where your original file is (that is if you didn’t change the save location).

You should now have a nice MP4 video file, usually with the file name as Your Video-mux.mp4!

I Can’t Believe My Eyes

The final file size for my example, a 1min 30sec long 720p HD video was 33.5MB, and yet it looks as good as the source file, which was 328MB in size. That’s 10 times smaller! And yet the quality is excellent. Just check it out on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0krXsEKdck&fmt=22