Share Your Experiences…with the World

If this iMovie tutorial still doesn’t help, I can recommend ScreenCastsOnline. They have excellent tutorials for all your Mac products: iMovie, iPod, iPhone and so forth.

From my experience posting your iMovie video to YouTube requires the following settings to get the best quality you can. You want to send YouTube the highest quality you can while still staying within their video and audio limitations.

Of course the settings I’m providing can be used with any video editing application, but since iMovie is used by so many novice videographers I felt some specific instructions would be useful. If you aren’t using iMovie 6 for this, be sure that your application can export to a .mp4 with H.264 video. Quicktime Player Pro version can also do this.

Since YouTube upload limitations will scale the video to 320 x 240 pixels there is no point to export it at a larger size. Better to apply higher quality settings to your file size limit, which is 100 megabytes set by Youtube.

I am assuming your video has been edited and is ready for export. Follow these steps to have a video that you can upload with confidence to YouTube.

Choosing the best settings for iMovie when exporting for YouTube:

1. Under the main menu click the Share menu option.
2. Choose the Share option at the bottom of the drop down menu.
3. The next window will allow you select from a popup menu. It is labeled “Compress movie for:”. You will chose Expert Settings. Click the share Share button in the bottom right. (see image #1)
4. The next window will allow you to choose where to save the video and what to name it. At the bottom of the window you will see a popup menu labeled Export. Choose the “Movie to MPEG-4″ option.
5. Click the Options… button to the right to choose specific video and audio settings.
6. In this window choose the following setting under the video choices. (see image #2)
   • Video Format: H.264
   • Data Rate: 2000 kbits/sec
   • Optimized for: Download
   • Image Size: 320 x 240 QVGA
   • Check Preserve aspect ration using: Fit within size
   • Frame Rate: 30
   • Key Frame: Automatic
   • Click the Video Options… button and then select the Main checkbox and the Best Quality radio button. Click OK.
7. Next choose the following Audio Settings:
   • Audio Format AAC-LC
   • Data Rate: 64kbs
   • Channels: Mono
   • Output Sample Rate: Recommended
   • Encoding Quality: Best
8. Click the OK button and in the next window click the Save button and wait for your high quality video to export.

You can see the latest video I have posted using these settings by viewing my family’s Zip Line in Hawaii.

If you need more help and you like the video instruction method. I can safely recommend ScreenCastsOnline.