Good morning all,
Can anyone provide a tutorial or information on the best way to format videos for youtube output.
I want to eliminate the cropping, resizing and degradation of video & sound quality that I have experienced in the past.
Is PAL bette than NTSC?
Thanks
The best quality that Youtube can play is FullHD and whenever possible this should be the size for your Animate project too. PAL and NTSC both are smaller SD formats. NTSC has the smalles resolution, an awful framerate and on TV a terrible color decompression (some people joke that NTSC means “Never the same color”). In generally you should avoid SD TV standards because they have annyoing stuff like uneven framerates (29.7 fps - awful… how are you supposed to work with that?), and interlaced pictures which you don’t need in digital animation.
So if you have a widescreen project choose FullHD 1920x1080 pixel with 24 or 25 fps (like most countries and cinema projectors use… for YouTube it’s also perfect). Offer YouTube a render in this high resolution, compressed as a H.264 and you should have a great crisp picture (check the YouTube help page for the current Mbits/s… the higher the better… youtube will reencode it anyway). For Youtube an MP3 compression with a 192 bitrate should be fine. During production you should keep sound as uncompressed wav files with 48khz.
You can find some more general thoughts about video encoding for animation in this article I wrote for Animator Island: http://www.animatorisland.com/?p=889
This was EXTREMELY helpful.
Thanks a million!
Nice blog, XarX!