Our stay with Lars’ family in Cuxhaven has been nothing but relaxation and chill times thus far. Well, isn’t that what vacation is supposed to be? Eating well, sleeping a lot, hanging out with family and sleeping more. Tomorrow we are planning to rent a car and check out some nearby cities and a huge annual art fair.

Here is my 1st attempt at editing a video for YouTube in iMovie HD on my new MacBook. It’s composed of 3 short videos and some stills I took with my digital camera from our time in Hamburg. Nothing too exciting, as I’m still a novice at this and just learning.

After reading a bunch of online tutorials on what the best compression technique is for videos to upload to YouTube, I came across a simple and straightforward method on this awesome blog : Will Video for Food to use with iMovie. Kevin Nalts writes: “Since I use iMovie, I simply select “Share: CD-ROM” and transform a potentially 30 GB iMovie file into a small (10-20) MB .mov file that seems to upload well. Also note that there’s software out there that has automated YouTube features, such as VirtualDub (for Windows users). These programs are great time-savers if you’re a hardcore YouTuber, and they should be considered.”

Also from CrunchGear, courtesy of Matt Hickey, here are some key factors to ensure you get the best optimization of your videos for YouTube:

1. Make your file a .mov or .mp4.
2. Set it to the YouTube-native size of 320×240 (aka QVGA).
3. Expect letterboxing if your HD camera shoots at a different aspect ration than the 4:3 that is 320×240. No way out of that unless you want to crop or stretch (yuck).
4. Make it as “bit-rich” as you can. Use a bitrate as high as you can up to 1200kbps (overkill). Somewhere between 700kbps and 1000kbps should do the trick nicely.
5. Use the MP3 audio codec (either CBR of VBR), which should be standard on your editor.

Do this and your video will look better and encode faster (reduce post-to-view lag)

More of my videos on YouTube