Most tutorials are outdated on getting the most out of a YouTube render. Now, with the director status you can upload up to 1000mb per video. I've found that if you upload a 640x480 (among other things) it will read your video as "high quality" and offer your viewers two versions (standard and high quality). It's amazing to me that YouTube doesn't offer specific optimal settings for what you should output to in that regard. I've only used .WMV and get decent results.

I do have a problem tho, and it's converting 16:9 footage to 4:3.

Let me explain. My timeline is working in 1,440 x 1,080. I have two video clips that I want to play at the same time as each other side by side. I then, goto the Pan/Crop tool on each and crop out the points of interest. After that I use the track motion controls to line up both videos to fill out the full 1,440 x 1,080.

When I goto render this clip at 640x480 with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.000 it crops the right and left side of the video when, in fact I want the video to be letter-boxed. I thought it would do this automatically but nigh.

What am I doing wrong? I do not want to change the project video properties because I'm also rendering this out in true 16:9 but I would also like the branding of youtube.

Help with my aspect ratio problem would be appreciated, and any other YouTube advice (settings, filetypes) would be nice for me and others as well.

Take your finished 16:9 HD project and embed it in an SD project. Make sure the nested .veg is not cropped but is instead zoomed all the way out with the bars on top & bottom. Then render from that project and you will get an SD project.

Take your finished 16:9 HD project and embed it in an SD project. Make sure the nested .veg is not cropped but is instead zoomed all the way out with the bars on top & bottom. Then render from that project and you will get an SD project.

As an example, the video on my landing page for YouTube used that effect. I had a 16:9 project that I imported into a 4:3 project. Then I used the crop to move the 16:9 up to the top to leave room for name at the bottom. It might not look as good as a normally letter boxed 16:9 production, but doing the titles like this helped me avoid putting the text over the picture which explodes render time because it has to do all sorts of transparency & AA work and that sort of text over video does not show up well at 320x240.

http://www.youtube.com/user/IdahoDigital