How to upload widescreen videos to YouTube (Part 2)

December 31, 2006

In my last post, I discussed how to prepare your widescreen videos prior to uploading it to YouTube. As you recall, YouTube only offers a video viewport that is sized like a small TV screen, with an aspect ratio of 4:3. In order for your video to get displayed there properly, you must resize and reformat it correctly. To do that, there are two methods you can use: letterbox and pan and scan. Recalling again from my last post, a letterboxed video is one that has black bars displayed at the top and at the bottom. These black bars preserve the video's proportion while keeping it centered vertically. But if you're annoyed by the black bars and want to view the video fullscreen, then you have to resort to the pan and scan method, which I'm going to discuss today.

In the pan and scan method, you are going to fit the height of the video inside YouTube's viewport, then crop off the excess left and right sides. To demonstrate, I'm going to use VirtualDubMod as my video editor. To install VirtualDubMod, read my last post for the instructions.

To do pan and scan, follow Steps 1 to 4 of the letterbox method. Then follow the steps below (screenshots are provided for each step):

1. For New Width and New Height, enter 448 and 336 respectively. (448×336 is the size of YouTube's viewport.) For the Filter mode, select Bicubic for best quality after resizing. Then click OK. 1 2 3
2. In the Filters dialog box, click the Cropping button. This will bring up the Filter input cropping dialog box. Locate the two spinner fields called X1 offset and X2 offset, situated at the upper-left and the upper-right corners of the dialog box, respectively. 1 2
3. Compute for an offset by using the following formula: If your video has width W and height H, then the offset is:

   offset = (W / 2) - (H * 2 / 3)

   In our example video, the width and height are 704 and 396 pixels respectively. Thus, the offset is computed as:

   offset = (704 / 2) - (396 * 2 / 3) = 352 - 264 = 88

   Round the answer to the nearest integer. So if the result is, say, 77.2253, then make it 77.

   Put this computed offset in the X1 offset and the X2 offset fields. Then click OK and close also the Filter dialog box. 1 2

4. Finally, follow Steps 7 to 9 of the letterbox method.

Congratulations! Your video is now pan-and-scanned. You can now upload it to YouTube.

I'm planning to make another tutorial for converting 2.35:1 (a.k.a. Theatrical) videos to 16:9.  These theatrical videos can look very narrow when letterboxed in a 4:3 screen. You might want to "enlarge" them a bit by letterboxing them at 16:9. Stay tuned.