Best way to get Movie ready for YouTube?

[spacescape]

I have a Music video we did back in 1999 in Flash which is converted to a .MOV file at 640x480 so we could put it on VHS (You know, those large tapes that we used to use to record movies and tv shows on). We decided tonight that we want it on YouTube and Embedded on our site. Right now it's about 800 MB. What is the best way to downsize it in quicktime? We have quicktime pro.

Thanks for any advice.

[dotman]

I think I remember the advice on the site is 320x240 at full quality. It'll obviously compress it. If it's huge, go ahead and compress it before uploading.

dot.

[The Grim Ninja]

I spent the whole day trying to get some video from dv format to either h.264 or DivX for uploading to YouTube. About 50 encodes later, I decided that quicktime (and any other encoder) just blow at converting dv to mp4 or divx.

I ended up using toast to encode it for a DVD, then mounting and using Handbrake to encode to h.264. Turned out great.

(Yes, I tried tons of settings, even the settings I always used for every DivX encode I'd made before, hundreds of videos, but kept getting horrible quality).

So, that's one option.


Of course, if worse doesn't come to worse, you could probably just encode it to h.264 at around 1000-1600 kbps and see how that looks. (bitrate depending on motion, if it's simple flash video, lower bitrates will probably suffice) I'd recommend 2-pass encoding for better quality.