YouTube comes of age. A bit...
I've had the fortune to be involved in a bit of video stuff recently. I was asked to produce a series of films for the Catholic Archdiocese of Armagh and then in work we have been doing a fair bit of stuff with video and enhancing your YouTube channel. All interesting stuff and I really enjoyed making the films as well as doing my own stuff with the family and creating those special moments. Great for sharing with friends and relatives.
So the next few posts are going to be exclusively video related. I promised John, our principal photographer that I would post this stuff as this is exactly some of the things we are looking to enhance within the Belfast Media Group.
YouTube. Great piece of innovation and brilliant for videos that entertain us during the long working day. No, sorry, we don't do that in our place of work. *Ahem*
Of course, a couple of the principal problems with YouTube is its lack of native widescreen support and the quality of the video itself. YouTube have just within the last week corrected one of those problems. Perhaps you have noticed that they used to produce videos in the 20th Century format of 4:3, the old traditional TV size. My problem recently is that in producing the films for Armagh the did the "letterbox" effect and had black bars at the top and the bottom as the video camera I was using was widescreen. Not true widescreen mind you, but wide enough to make it look modern. Now if you go to YouTube you should have noticed that it is all change and they have moved into the 21st Century and everything is now widescreen. Great for us at BMG as we are now producing all our videos on 16:9 so this is perfect for us.
Now, the next problem involves a bit of trickery and if you click on the title of this article it takes you to the link where I found the trick. It is really very good. As we all know, YouTube can look very pixelated. Features and text can be downright illegible but if you upload video to YouTube that is reasonably better than what you get back, then this trick will enable you to embed this in the URL link and display quite significantly better quality. Here is how you do it.
Just simply add &fmt=18 at the end of the URL. That's it. Nothing more. However, a YouTube engineer got in touch with the author of the article and said that if you add &fmt=22 it gives the highest quality available and is the equivalent of 720p. Now that is not to be sneezed at. Given that we recently shot video at our fantastic Aisling Awards in the Europa Hotel using a very nice camera with exceptional quality, we shall be field testing this on YouTube to see how the quality really shows up. The link gives and example of low quality and high quality and you really do notice the difference.
Give this a go with your own videos on YouTube and see the difference in your own work.
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