How do I make my youtube videos not blurry?

Clement Saggers · 12-03-2008, 04:54 PM

I have a problem with YouTube. EVERY video I upload comes out blurry, the originals I have on the hard drive all look fine, crystal clear and so sharp you could cut yourself on them. But when I upload them on to the 'tube they look awful. Someone suggested I use 640 x 360 resolution, my camera and video editing software is more than capable to do this resolution, so I did my video at that resolution and guess what, IT'S STILL BLURRY check this link out you'll see what I mean:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZFxgidvoBg

. This was done at 640 by 360, xvid codec, 1440kbps, 30fps. What resolution and video codec should I use? I want people to actually see what I'm doing in my videos.

**zuluclayman** · 12-04-2008, 03:21 AM

Youtube uses the .flv file format, which is not known for its high quality, for their videos.
If you follow the recommendations here (which you are pretty close to) you may see a difference - just remember: every time a video is compressed it is going to lose a little (or a lot) of clarity so compressing from camera to edited image then recompressing with xVid or DivX the recompressing to .flv is allowing a lot of degradation of video information.
You say your images are razor sharp on your comp - even when you are reasonably close in with focal length? many handycams don't have particularly good lenses for close (macro) work.

**blah789** · 12-04-2008, 07:50 PM

How high is the bitrate of your video? Sites like youtube like to shrink stuff a lot to preserve bandwidth (imagine what would happen to the site if all the vids they were streaming were HD).
They've changed their FAQ page a bit
http://help.youtube.com/support/yout...44&topic=10523
It says "If you don't think your current video file format is recognized by YouTube, you may get the best results from converting your file to MPEG4 video with MP3 audio."
Like I said, it's changed. A long time ago (I don't recall when) I think they said to get best quality, use DivX 5 (or 6) video at 320x240 and 30 fps, and use MP3 audio. They didn't mention a bitrate though. That's just from memory, so I may be off.

M0winck3l · 12-05-2008, 11:40 AM

Uploading video files to YouTube, where your file is converted to .flv will cause some loss of quality in your video. There's not really any way around that. You can do the "&fmt=18" high quality hack to sort of marginalize the problem, but don't expect much. I also think if you have one of those "special" accounts your videos will look better, but since I do not have one I cannot confirm that.