What Adobe Media Encoder settings are you using for creating YouTube videos? Their limits are 10 minutes and 100MB. I'm using Adobe Production Studio Premium, and on the whole, the Windows Media 9 codec offers the best quality/size compromise. Unless I'm missing somrthing, comparable-quality QuickTime files are easily 4x the size of WMV files.

Thanks in advance for your recommendations!

T.J.

The QuickTime H.264 codec can offer comparable quality at the same bit rate to Windows Media and RealMedia. It can be accessed by simply installing the free QuickTime 7 Player. However, it still remains that the Adobe Media Encoder's bit rate slider is wildly inaccurate encoding to QuickTime files. Plus, H.264 is a rather processor intensive codec known for long encoding time. Since you have no compelling reason to use QuickTime, the easiest solution would be to stick with Windows Media.

I found that no matter how I encoded clips for youtube they re-encoded them and they turned out looking like crap. You might want to try putfile.com. They do not re-encode the clips.

Regards,

I'd look into whether or not they have an option that doesn't involve the re-encoding to Flash video that they do on their server end.

YouTube always looks like crap because they're re-encoding low-bitrate web video to yet another low-bitrate. Recipe for badness.

Can you upload .FLV files?

I tried a bunch of different things, and a generic mpeg in the media encoder seems to be the best. 5 minutes is under 100MB, and if you have a longer file, you can either decrease the quality (which doesnt seem to affect it much) or you can decrease the size. I'm quite happy with how my videos look on youtube - check em out to see the quality, if you'd like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWte9J3nm28

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ8GpUJXgNE

I've noticed that I get the best results when uploading in QuickTime format. I encode my video's using Sorenson Squeeze.