Upload Frame Sizes and Ratios

There is no need to add black padding to any-sized video for YouTube. YT accepts the standard frame sizes of 720x576 and 720x480 at 4:3 (in other words, 768x576 and 640x480) and all HD sizes in the 16:9 ratio. YT will also accept some oddball sizes without displaying black padding on the sides. Sizes that work from my experience: Any 4:3 ratio such as 1920x1440 or 1536x1152 (good for analogue tape captures) Any 8:3 ratio such as 3840x1440 eg two 4:3 videos side-by-side. Oddball shapes I haven’t had success with: 1566x1440: this stretched out to fit a 16:9 window. It was an odd-shaped screencapture for a video tutorial. I had to place it into a 4:3 frame so it ended up with small black side-bars (pillarboxing) to take it out to 1920x1440.

Thumbnails

YouTube thumbnails are 16:9, and will cut off the top and bottom of 4:3 images. If you want to use a 4:3 image but don’t want cropping, you’ll need to pad out the image with side bars to make it up to 16:9. An example: Original 4:3 image for thumbnail: YouTube crops from top and bottom to 16:9 to create the thumbnail: Side bars can be added to display complete 4:3 image by padding out to fill the 16:9 frame, therefore no YT cropping: For example, a 1920x1440 4:3 image would need side bars of 320 pixels each side to fill out to a 16:9 frame. A 1536x1152 image would need side bars of 256 pixels each.

Banners

Being driven mad by the crazy cropping of your banner? Does your banner look like this, with most of the image cropped off? Here’s why! Youtube crops your image depending on whether you’re watching on a normal 16-9 screen or a phone screen ie portrait. Here’s the Youtube Banner display during setup; the blue outer box is a standard 16:9 image I made up with a grid. The inner blue box is what is displayed on a phone: Result, desktop: Result, (top of) Phone: So, to be on the safe side, I suggest you use the inner area. The final results are: Desktop: and Phone: You can download my grid image from here. RC the link and choose Save link as…

Deinterlacing

The accepted wisdom is that it is better to deinterlace footage before uploading to YT.

YouTube Codecs

The codecs YouTube uses for it’s recompressing of your videos depends on the dimensions of your video. For files below 1152 pixels high, YT uses the lower- quality H264 codec. For videos of 1152 pixels and higher, YT uses the better-quality VP9 codec. The video and audio codecs that YT uses for a YT video can be found by RC on the video and choose Stats for nerds. VP9 and AV1 are better codecs so uploading at the larger frame size is desirable. Note that the bitrate of the uploaded file does not affect how the video is processed. Note also that VP9 will be used for all YT video display sizes, even down to 240P, provided the source video you upload meets the criteria for VP9 encoding.

Upload Bitrates

The bitrate you encode your file at for upload is entirely up to you, and is basically limited by what you can accept in relation to time to upload and also the YT limits. If your video is short, uploading in a lossless codec is an option eg a TV advert captured from a tape. Longer videos, such as a holiday, may need to be encoded into H264 first to keep the size down so you don’t spend all day and night uploading. I use 20,000kb/sec for my H264/MP4 videos.

Video Analysis

Stats For Nerds

RC on the video and choose Stats For Nerds. Various details of the video and audio are displayed.

Single Frame Advance

To step through a YT video frame by frame, pause the video then use the comma and fullstop keys to step backwards and forwards, one frame at a time. Ensure the video Setting (settings cog) is set to the appropriate resolution; lower resolutions lower the frame rate, whereas HD settings will display the file’s original framerate.

YouTube Security/Access

There are three levels of access for YouTube videos, set by the uploader during the upload process (and can be changed later in your channel studio): Public: Anybody can search for and view. Unlisted: Only somebody who has the link to the video can view. Private: Only the people invited by the uploader can view.

Child Safety

YT is very strict on posting videos of children. Anything that remotely looks like child exploitation (including innocuous home video closeups of kids at the beach) will be removed by YT and the poster will have to undergo a short online course on the issue. I speak from personal experience!