If you’re like millions of others around the world you’ve been to and even uploaded videos to YouTube. But then you had all sorts of problems getting your files to show properly or look good or a hundred other things. So here is a quick how-to that will help you optimize your video for YouTube You need to make sure that when you save your video for YouTube that you do so in a format that is not only compatible with YouTube buy will display properly when streamed back through the web to your viewers.

In the meantime, read through this article and youll get some better looking videos in the long run.

Resolution ” YouTube display in a fairly specific resolution and to help their compression utilities get your video up with the minimum of loss of quality you need to match your video up to their resolution. Since they’re using 720p now, which means you should have 1280×720 pixel resolution you need to set your video resolution accordingly. This will cut down on compression time and give you a better idea of what your video will look like in the end. Its not so bad really. The resolution is HD and that means that you can get a real HD experience out of YouTube.

Bitrate ” This is how much data is processed per second when your video is being created or saved. Whenever possible you want this to be as high of a number as you can get. Generally youd like it to be in the range of 6Mbps and 8Mbps. Thats so much data so that when your video goes through the YouTube compressor online, even though there might be a loss of quality, it will still retain enough to look good as it gets popped out the other side. This will make for large file sizes as well so be aware of that.

There are several other factors that you should think about here as well. The Codec, software that encodes your video to a particular format, for YouTube that is .mov or .mp4 so make sure you have it in that. If you dont youre going to need a piece of video editing software like Quicktime Pro, Premier, or some other software on the market with multiple file format compatibility. Audio should be set in 44.1KHz Stereo MP3 or AAC format on your video and finally get your framerate at 30fps or higher to make sure theres not a lot of jitter and jumps.

Once youve got all this, upload your video, wait for YouTube to process it and you should a nice looking video pushed out to the site for your friends, family and complete strangers. Good Luck in your video marketing efforts.