Upload Your Videos to YouTube – Part one

Unless you've been living in a cave, you probably know about YouTube. It's a great way to view movie trailers, music performances, celebrity footage, and clips of your friends, among other things. But have you ever thought about uploading your own videos?

It's easier than you might think. In fact, there's a good chance you already have everything you'll need to record, edit, and upload video files. And if you don't want to share your videos with the entire world, YouTube lets you make any video private—available to you and as many as 25 other people. So what are you waiting for? Here are five easy steps that will quickly have you streaming your video creations over the Internet.

Shoot Your Video

If your digital camera has a movie mode, you may be able to use it to record your YouTube video

You can use almost any video-recording device for YouTube, including digital cameras, cell phones, flash-based camcorders (such as Flip Video), MiniDV/DVD/hard drive camcorders, and even Webcams. If you can save the video to—and view the video on—your computer, odds are you'll be able to edit it and upload it to YouTube.

Before you shoot your video, think about how you watch other people's videos on YouTube. If the action is too hard to see, the video is too tiny, out-of-focus, or jerky, or you can't see the point of the video in the first few seconds, then you'll quickly lose interest. Now address those annoyances in your own video production. Use mostly close-ups. Record in a resolution of at least 320x240—but 640x480 would be even better. Use a frame rate of 30 frames per second. And forget the long-winded intro—go right to the interesting part.

Edit Your Video

Windows Movie Maker has the basic tools needed to edit a video. It's included with both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

YouTube can accept a wide range of video formats, including AVI, MOV, MPG, and WMV files. If you plan to edit your video, make sure your video-editing program can save it to a file format that's compatible with YouTube. Your editing program will recompress the video as it saves your edited version, so save it to the highest quality possible.

You may already have a video editor on your computer. Both Windows XP and Windows Vista include Windows Movie Maker, a simple-to-use video-editing application. Recent versions of Nero and Roxio Easy Media Creator also have a video-editing component. We'll be using Windows Movie Maker from Windows XP for our example because it's widely available, but if you have another program you're comfortable with—and it's compatible with your video-recording device and YouTube's video formats—then use that one.

With Windows Movie Maker, you can arrange the order of your video shots, trim the shots if necessary, as well as add dissolves, transitions, and special effects. To save a file at the highest quality, choose File and then Save Movie File from the pull-down menus. Select My Computer as the save location, click Next, and click Next again if you're content with the default filename and directory. Then select Other Settings and then "High quality video (large)." Click Next again to complete the process.

YouTube generally limits each video file to 10 minutes and 100MB, so plan to stay within those parameters. There are exceptions, however. You can exceed the 100MB restriction if you use the YouTube Uploader application, rather than the usual upload method. And you can exceed the 10-minute limitation if you apply for a special account, such as Director, Comedian, Musician, or Guru. Check the Help section on YouTube for details.