How do I upload to you tube?
 

I have some footage on a dv tape that I would like to upload to you tube and vimeo (its hd footage) I'm using Pinnicale to edit. Should I save the footage as a file and then upload from there? Whats the best way to preserve the quality when I upload. I've seen great footage online that seems to have no loss in quality when uploaded. Any thoughts?

Try searching keywords like "youtube" and "quality" to find threads on this.

Otherwise, spend time at:

Uploading Videos - YouTube Help

...and remember that quality in=quality out.

Here is some resources for the best possible quality for yourself.

YouTube - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia will show u all the quality stuff for youtube...

Vimeo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia shows formats and stuff.

You would want to render the file out, most likely under a MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) setting. 2100 bitrate for the video and 256 bitrate for the audio. Would give you the best possible quality.

Depending on the footage, and your H.264 codec (and encoding settings), 2100kbps may or may not give you decent quality (will definitely not be best possible quality- you can certainly increase quality by using a higher bitrate). I'd suggest at least going to 3000kbps (generally), unless you have a really slow internet connection.

One of the best quality H.264 codec implementations out there is x264, and it's open source freeware to boot. MediaCoder (also freeware) offers a GUI, with very robust options, for encoding with x264 to MP4 containers (although it's flaky sometimes).

I suggest ignoring YouTube and Vimeo recommendations to insert keyframes every second (for example, every 24 frames with 24p footage). There's just no point. Frequent keyframes will make the video more seekable (fast seeks), but YouTube and Vimeo transcode your video anyway (no matter what you do), so there's no real benefit*. A longer keyframe interval, like 300 (or more) frames, will increase image quality at any given bitrate (and especially at low bitrates). Also, crank up maximum B-frames allowed between I and/or P frames to at least 16 (I like using 64 or more for low bitrate encoding), allow use of 2 or more reference frames (up to 6 - more just doesn't do much at all for quality), and allow B-frames to be used as references. Definitely use 2-pass encoding.

*Vimeo does allow users (who are logged in) to download the original file (that you uploaded), so if your intent is for people to download the original file, then inserting more keyframes makes some sense. Even then, I'd only suggest a keyframe interval of every 2 or 3 seconds (still reasonably seekable, yet pretty efficient compression wise).

Once the video is uploaded, is it not re processed to 2000 kbs? so 2100 would give the video an extra 100 and not chew up your monthly upload cap as much.

The image quality of the video you upload is what counts (not the bitrate per se). Regardless of what bitrate Vimeo or YouTube transcode it at, the better image quality the source, the better image quality the result. You can provide better image quality source by encoding at higher bitrates.

With Vimeo, if you are uploading many videos, yes, the weekly upload cap might be a factor in deciding what bitrate to encode at (to make files small enough to fit within the cap). I don't think YouTube has any weekly or monthly cap.