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Need advice on making a video for YouTube.

KenKen
edited May 2007 in Technology
I've been thinking on making a video to post for YouTube, but I wanted to seek some advice before I do so first. This is a 2-part question, and I hope you all will be able to help me.

1) Are there any good, free (possibly open sourced?) video editing software that I can download? My laptop at home only has Windows Movie Maker, and it seems to be able to only record in .WMV. I'd like the software to be able to save the video in various formats. I'm probably be recording my source footage with a digital camera, and the file format would be .MOV

2) And related to the first question, which file format offers the best 'quality to file size' ratio? From my limited understanding, .AVI files are really large, and there are other better file formats around. YouTube recommends .MP4; Would this be a good format to use? And could you all recommend a good video editing software to use to convert the video from one format to the next?

I'm asking because I know I could easily just record the video from my camera and either 1) directly upload it or 2) to use Windows MovieMaker. I would just like to ask if there are other better ways to make a video file that is relatively small in size (so it doesn't take long to load on YouTube) whilst still maintaing good video quality.

Thanks in advance!

Ken

Comments

  • I don't know any particular good free non-linux video editors, but I do know a quick search of SourceForge comes up with a lot.

    Yes, for YouTube MP4 is best. Also, whatever editing software you get will have a video capture feature, so don't worry about getting it off your camera.
  • www.youtube.com/t/howto_makevideo
    Once you're happy with your final result, you'll need to save the video in a format that YouTube can accept in order to upload. Unless you're a professional video producer, we recommend that you save your videos as either QuickTime .MOV, Windows .AVI, or .MPG files— these are the most common formats and they work well within our system. We specifically recommend the MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at 320x240 resolution with MP3 audio. Resizing your video to these specifications before uploading will help your clips look better on YouTube.
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