How to upload widescreen videos to YouTube (Part 1)

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:

• VirtualDubMod (VirtualDubMod 1.5.10.2)
• VirtualDubMod bugfix/CVS (1.5.10.2 build 2542)

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.

1. Open your video in VirtualDubMod. 1 2
2. Identify the aspect ratio of your video. To do that, go to the File menu and select File Information. Then find the Frame size entry and get the width and the height of your video (it's 704×396 in the following screenshots). After that, divide the width by the height using a calculator. If the result is 1.333, then your video is 4:3. If the result is 1.7777, then your video is 16:9. If the result is 2.35, then your video is 2.35:1. 1 2
3. Select the video segment you want to process. But if you want to process the whole video instead, skip this step. But remember, YouTube requires all videos to be not more than 100 MB in size AND not more than 10 minutes in length, unless you have a Director account.  1 2 3 4
4. Activate the resize filter, then double-click resize to pop up the Filter: resize configuration box. 1 2 3 4
5. For New Width and New Height, enter 448 and 252 respectively if your video is 16:9, or 448 and 190 respectively if your video is 2.35:1. For the filter mode, select Bicubic for best quality after resizing. You may optionally preview the result. (For the reason why 448×252 is entered for 16:9 videos, YouTube's viewport is 448×336 in size. To fit the width of the video while preserving the original proportion, the new height of the video should be 448 * 9 / 16 or 252. Similar math applies to 2.35:1 videos.) 1 2 3
6. Close all the Filter dialog boxes. 1 2
7. Activate the Video Compression dialog box. You will find there a list of available codecs, two of which are DivX and XviD. YouTube requires that your video's codec should be either DivX or XviD. You can choose either of the two, but you might encounter some problems when reformatting your video using DivX. I suggest that you use XviD instead, and XviD is also the one I'm using in this discussion. 1 2
8. Configure the quality settings for the codec you chose. In the screenshots, I set the target bitrate to 2000 kbps for high quality output. (Initially, you will see Target quantizer instead of Target bitrate in the XviD Configuration box. Just click the Target quantizer button to switch to Target bitrate.) 1 2 3 4 5
9. Finally, save your changes to another file. Only the video segment you selected earlier (Step 3) will be saved, together with all the resizing and the reformatting (unless you processed the whole video). Upon saving, the conversion process will start to kick in. 1 2 3 4

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.