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Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Youtubing redefined

Who doesnt know Youtube ? The mega video sharing website, now owned by Google, second largest search engine in the World Wide Web, it is an excellent place to waste time, get information, see #fail videos for laughs etc.

For many of us, the concept of Youtubing, as it is referred to as nowadays, seems simple at first sight. There seems to be nothing too complicated, just shoot a video, and upload it.

But, as always, there is always things going on behind the scenes. I am sure many of us have tried at some point to film something to upload to Youtube, but ultimately gave up, due to the huge complexity. Believe it or not, filming something, editing it according to your need, getting the size of the video down, trimming it, and finally uploading it, is not at all easy.

After many days of thinking and speculation, I finally decided to shoot something to upload to Youtube. When you start doing it, then you actually realize the issues. Like everyone, I faced issues too.

I faced two major issues while filming my video:
1. I dont own a tripod, getting my Canon EOS 60D to stay balanced, and produce a good, well focused video was a very hard job.
2. The output video turned out to be 3.7GB in size (length of video was approximately 5 mins). In India, Internet is slow as hell, so in order to upload that, I needed to reduce the size a lot.

The solution to my first issue was managed by a fat ISC Mathematics book. I propped up the camera on it, set the focal length to an appropriate distance and focused on the object properly before even starting the video.

To reduce the video size, I used Handbrake. It took a few tries to find optimal settings, so as to maintain quality, and reduce size at the same time. With the settings listed below, I managed to trim down the video size to only 230MB, for full 1080p resolution.

Video Encoder : H.264
Framerate : Same as Source (Variable Framerate)
Quality: RF 22.5
H.264 Profile: main
H.264 Level: 4.2

Reference Frames: 3
Maximum B-Frames: 3
Pyramidal B-Frames: Normal
8x8 Transform: Yes
CABAC Entropy: Yes

The rest of the settings are set to the defaults of the High Profile preset.
With those settings, the quality loss was negligible, but the size was optimal.

Finally, the last step, uploading to Youtube. This was by far the simplest step, open your profile, go to Video Manager, select the file and upload.

Equipment I used:
1. Canon EOS 60D
2. Canon EF-S 18-135mm Lens
3. Sandisk SDHC 4GB Class 6 Memory Card
4. Understanding ISC Mathematics by ML Aggarwal (My Tripod :P )

In case you are wondering, and wish to watch my video, here it is.


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