WoWEggTube

Regardless of what resolution or frame rate you captured your footage in, if you plan to use YouTube, you will be constrained by its format limitations.

Recording

I prefer using Fraps for my recording video (http://www.fraps.com/). For top quality I set to record at Full-size of the viewing resolution at 29.97 frames a second. YouTube allows the following frame rates:

30 FPS Actually 29.97 frames a second, the smoothest quality for YouTube.

25 FPS PAL standard; exactly 25 frames a second.

24 FPS NTSC standard; 23.97 frames a second.

If you want to get fancy and save space record at Half-size at double the final fps. For example for 1080i, play the game at 1920×1080, record at half-size (960×540) at 59.94, 50 or 47.94 fps and then interlace it later using software.

To record in even smaller files, record half-size at 23.97 fps and use software to interlace later, this however will cause a noticeable loss in quality. YouTube’s best quality options for resolution are:

Resolution

1080p As good as it gets.

16:9 1920:1080

4:3 1440:1080

720p My preferred resolution. A good balance between quality and performance.

16:9 1280:720

4:3 960:720

480p DVD quality. Might look ok depending on the content.

16:9 856:480

4:3 640:480

Those are YouTube’s high resolution categories and all uploaded videos will be fitted within those boundaries.

For example a video recorded at 1680×1050, YouTube will automatically resize the video to fit inside 1280×720. The new resolution will be 1152×720. The video will look good, but quality is lost when YouTube has to rescales the footage. Our suggestion would be to resize the video manually before uploading. Below are a few conversions for common resolutions:

Aspect Ratio Conversions

16:10 1920×1200 => 1728×1080

1680×1050, 1440×900, 1280×800 => 1152×720

5:4 1280×1024 => 900×720

4:3 1600×1200 => 1440×1080

1280×960, 1152×864, 1024×768 => 960×720

Editing

As mentioned above, quality is lost when uploading to YouTube, but quality is also lost every time video is re-encoded or compressed. Reducing the amount of times video is compressed can increase the quality of the final streaming version.

If possible, I like to work with the raw version of video and try to output from Sony Vegas as an mp4.

I record at 1280×720, so my process looks like:

Raw = > Video Editing => Final => Upload. Just three steps.

Versus compressing after recording.

Raw => Compression => Video Editing => Final => Resize => Upload. Five steps and a lot of compression.
If the size of all the data is way too much to deal with, I’d suggest resizing the video before you use it in Vegas:

Raw => Compressed and Resized at once => Video Editing => Final => Upload. To preserve quality.
It is also possible to resize the video while using video editing software, but from experience using software to do so before editing footage has resulted in the best quality.

Youtube stores its HD videos as mp4 files and I would suggest outputting as an MP4 before uploading. Sony Vegas has a preset HD setup for internet videos.

If and mp4 option is not available for your software, just upload in any of the other excepted formats for HD: WMV, AVI, MOV, MPEG or MKV.

Audio

Code the audio as an mp3. That’s it, lol.