How I Made My First YouTube Video
Here is my first YouTube video. Which actually turns out to be two videos as you will learn in a moment. The specific content of this video may not be interesting to you unless your kids also go to the same school as mine. I took this video at the dedication ceremony for my children’s new school DIscovery Charter School. What I found interesting is how difficult and how time-consuming it is to upload something like this to the Internet. There were no completely free tools to do this acceptably either that I could find.
I started by taking this video using my Samsung Digital camcorder which has the great advantage of capturing video directly to AVI files. The dedication ceremony was 18 minutes long and at highest quality that resulted in an 872MB file. My first problem was to reduce this to a manageable size. I attempted to load the video into Apple QuickTime Professional but it would not accept the large original file and just died. I could watch the video in Windows movie maker but they were reading the options that I found useful to export it to a better format. I often go to YouTube, a popular video sharing site, so I decided to try to upload the file there. You cannot upload files that are larger than 100 MB or longer than 10 minutes. YouTube also prefers 320×240 videos in MPG format. My video was very different so knew I had some serious work to do.
I searched and downloaded a variety of video conversion tools attending to find one that would resample the video into something manageable. After much searching I settled on Ulead Video Studio 10. First I had the video converted to iPod format but this was still too large. So after some tweaking using the custom save as option I was able to get the right format file and make the entire video under 100 MB. Unfortunate still too long for YouTube, so I had to cut the video into two pieces. For me, Apple QuickTime professional was the quickest way. These conversions all took a long time, and I have a very fast PC with a lot of RAM. Finally it took over half an hour to upload the pieces on to YouTube site.