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.
In this post, I'm going to use VirtualDubMod to illustrate the video editing. I like VirtualDubMod because it's a very powerful yet lightweight video editing software, and most of all, it's free. To install VirtualDubMod, install first the DivX and the XviD codecs, then download the following zipped files from the VirtualDubMod site:
Create a directory called VirtualDubMod in the C:\Program Files\ directory. Then extract the files into C:\Program Files\VirtualDubMod, in the order shown above, overwriting any existing files. Finally, click VirtualDubMod.exe to launch the program.
Create a directory called VirtualDubMod in the C:\Program Files\ directory. Then extract the files into C:\Program Files\VirtualDubMod, in the order shown above, overwriting any existing files. Finally, click VirtualDubMod.exe to launch the program (screenshot).
To resize and reformat your video into letterbox, follow the steps below. Screenshots are provided for each step.
Voila! Your video is now properly resized. You can now upload it to YouTube. Have fun. 
Strictly speaking, up to this point your video is still not yet reformatted. But when YouTube displays your video, YouTube will reformat it for you by automatically providing the black bars above and below your video.
For those of you who are irritated by the black bars, you might find the pan and scan technique better. See my next post.
Thanks for taking the time to write all this out. Very helpful! I followed all you steps and found that YouTube still resized my video to fit their TV aspect ratio. I fiddled around a bit and found the info I was missing. May I suggest that you add to your step #5 (resizing filter) the options of selecting the ‘Expand frame and letterbox image’ checkbox and assigning the frame width and height to be 228 x 336 px. This will fill out the sides with the black letterbox and not allow YouTube to resize your video. Thanks again!
Posted by Josh at February 7, 2007, 2:04 amSorry, make that 448 x 336 px. Damn number pad…
Posted by Josh at February 7, 2007, 2:52 amThanks for the tip, Josh. I’ll include that later.
I actually used to do “Expand frame and letterbox image” before I discovered a long time that YouTube automatically letterboxes 16:9 videos. Since then, I do not perform that step anymore whenever I upload widescreen videos.
But AFAIK YouTube only letterboxes the videos whenever it correctly detects the proportion as 16:9. On the other hand, I’m not really sure if YouTube can properly letterbox anamorphically-proportioned videos (common anamorphic sizes are 720×480 and 720×576 from DVD sources). Anamorphic videos are always sized that way, regardless of whether the videos are supposed to be displayed at 4:3 or 16:9. The actual aspect ratio (4:3 or 16:9) is kept in the MPEG header of the anamorphic video, but this information will be lost when someone just carelessly converts/rips it to AVI. I think YouTube will get confused if it cannot determine anymore the video’s correct aspect ratio.
Posted by Perry Valdez at February 8, 2007, 1:52 amI’m looking forward to your Pan & Scan guide. Letterboxed widescreen looks wayyyy too small for me at Youtube’s resolution.
Posted by Paul at February 9, 2007, 6:08 amHi Paul, see my pan and scan tutorial here:
http://perryv.i.ph/blogs/facesmoon/2006/12/31/how-to-upload-widescreen-videos-to-youtube-part-2/
Posted by Perry Valdez at February 9, 2007, 9:11 amuhm.. i was looking for how to embed a youtube video in a post… cant seem to make it work when i edit the post in html.. it doesnt work.. can you help me?
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Posted by generic cialis at July 3, 2007, 10:53 amVery well explained. I’ve blogged a similar article on how to use Virtualdub to resize video for YouTube with some screenshots. My method uses Virtualdub’s filters to resize the video in the viewport.
Posted by KevBlog at July 18, 2007, 12:18 amvery helpful, thankyou
Posted by tim at July 23, 2007, 11:26 amVery Helpful so far,
Ik have some sunscreen effect in some parts of the video???
http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=hABP7APnFLQ
Can you tel me what i did do wrong
Posted by Bird at July 30, 2007, 8:17 amIt really saves me time and effort. thanks for the tip.
Posted by Generic Cialis at August 29, 2007, 11:01 pmthis custom windows moviemaker plugin seems to work pretty well… except there’s a purple box inthe upper left-hand corner… oh well.
httpwww.podyourband.comletterboxer
Posted by dennis at September 8, 2007, 7:29 amoops, try this link
http://www.podyourband.com/letterboxer/
Posted by dennis at September 8, 2007, 7:30 amthanks for this info
Posted by meeble at October 16, 2007, 12:32 pmYou completely forgot about taking care of most people who have videos in 640×480; 4:3!!
As I followed your step, I couldn’t go on from step 5 on wards. How about telling something there to resize the video to meet the requirement, etc. Its sad that your steps are as complicated as the tech world!!! Future Steps ? try making simpler and with BEGINNERS in mind!
Cheers!
Posted by Ruben at October 31, 2007, 12:47 pmGreat Help Thank you
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Posted by Labrenda Youmans at January 30, 2008, 7:02 amHere is a URL to 16×9 playback of the first video on this page using my simple widescreen player page:
http://www.geocities.com/themissoulian/ws.htm?v=hKRFYaX-w20
By uploading your widescreen videos in “squeezed” format and providing a link to widescreen playback in your video description, you can eliminate the other steps and also make the most of YouTube’s available video resolution.
See this page for more info:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WMdkmn7a2M
Posted by The Missoulian at March 31, 2008, 5:19 amif you want to watch youtube video in widescreen format by default, try this
http://foolrulez.org/blog/2008/11/youtube-widescreen-video-enabled/
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