How to upload widescreen videos to YouTube (Part 1)

December 19, 2006

Update: My pan and scan tutorial is now available here. 

YouTube displays its videos in a viewport that is sized like a small TV screen.

But what if your video is widescreen? How would it look like in YouTube?

I just want to give some tips on how to prepare your widescreen videos before you upload it to YouTube.

For starters, YouTube's video viewport has a size of 448×336 pixels according to my own manual measurements. The viewport has an aspect ratio of 4:3 (TV screen proportion, a.k.a Fullscreen). Videos made for or captured from TV readily fit inside this viewport.

But widescreen videos are becoming more and more common today, especially with the advent of HDTV. The most common widescreen ratio is 16:9, although the wider 2.35:1 (a.k.a. Theatrical) is increasingly becoming popular as well. To give you some visual ideas, here are some images:

But regardless of the aspect ratio of the video you are going to upload, the video will still be shown in a 4:3 viewport. So how would you fit a widescreen video inside YouTube's viewport?

It's not always affordable to upload your video as is, because the bigger the file size of the video, the longer it will take to upload AND be processed by YouTube. So you would usually have to resize the video using a video editing program. But if you just resized the video to 448×336 (or 320×240 as recommended by YouTube), you will get this:

As you can see, the video is squeezed. Eggheads are talking and walking around. Everything is out of proportion.

 If you care about preserving proportion, then there are two ways to resize and reformat your video:

1. Letterbox - Fit the width of your video inside the 4:3 viewport, then put black bars above and below your video to keep it centered vertically.

 

 

2.  Pan and scan - Fit the height of your video inside the 4:3 viewport, then crop off the excess left and right sides.

 

 In this post, I will discuss the letterbox method. I will discuss the pan and scan method in my next post.

 
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