I may have mentioned before that my mom is very cool and hip in all sorts of ways including technology and the internet. Gmail, iPhoto, flickr, Time Machine backups… she uses them all. She also uses me as her mac / internet helpdesk. So it was only a matter of time before I received this help request from her:
I am uploading a video with sound on You tube w/470mb. After about 2 hours of “loading” it stops with “problem loading page”. What’s the problem kaya?
How to optimize your video for YouTube upload using Apple iMove on a Mac
YouTube has two main video file upload limitations: no more than 10 minutes per video and no larger than 100MB per video. If your video is too large, YouTube won’t accept it after you’ve uploaded it. But my mom ran into another problem before she even got to the rejection - uploading a 470 megabyte file takes forever. And chances are, her upload connection to YouTube was disrupted sometime in those 2 hours of loading.
So before she tries to re-upload, she needs to make the file smaller. (Technically, Youtube works best when the aspect ratio of the movie is to 320 x 240 pixels at QVGA) You can do this using a video editing application - one comes already installed on your mac called “iMovie”. The application icon is shown here on the right.
- Find and launch the iMovie application
- Choose “Start a new project”
- Import your original clip (go to File > Import… from the application menu)
- Export your clip:
a. go to File > Share…
b. Select the “Quicktime” option from the icons at the top of the dialog window (not Mail, Homepage, Videocamera, iDVD or Bluetooth)
c. From the “Compress movie for:” dropdown, select “Expert Settings”
d. Click the “Share” button
e. A new window will pop-up with more options
f. Name your movie and choose where you want it to be saved on your computer
g. From the “Export” dropdown, select “Movie to MPEG-4″
h. From the “Use:” menu, select “Streaming - Medium”
i. Click “save”
Before you try and upload this new file to YouTube, make sure it is 100MB or less. If it isn’t, I suggest you crop your movie until it is. Alternately, you can try for a lower quality video by resaving using the steps above, but instead of choosing “Streaming - Medium”, choose “Streaming - Low” from the final dialog box.
There are many other things you can do to your movie while in iMovie - shorten it if it is too long, edit out unwanted sections of your movie, add titles and subtitles or a soundtrack. For that tutorial, you’ll have to wait until my mom asks for it.
