Since it was founded in 2005 by former employees of the popular online money-management site, Paypal, YouTube has become the leader in the online video community.

It’s not a surprise however that most users of YouTube do not know how easy it is to upload their own videos, much less how to make them look top-quality. With these quick and simple steps we will show you how to have your own collection of high resolution videos to show the world.

How to Upload

1) First, make sure your video meets the following requirements:

2) Now click the button, located in the top-right corner of any screen.

3) Click “Browse” to find the file on your computer you want to upload.

4) Click “Upload Video” to start the upload process.

5) While your video is uploading you can fill out the Title, Description, Tags, and Category fields. This isn’t a requirement but will help other people around the world to find your video.

6) Click the “Save Changes” button to save the updates you have made.

Be prepared — depending on the connection between you and YouTube and the size of the video, video uploads can take minutes to hours.

Tips for making your video high-quality

The following is a list of things you can do before uploading your videos to make them look their best.

YouTube’s recommended video settings are:

The original video needs to be as high of a resolution as possible. Examples include but are not limited to:

It is very important that you keep an aspect ratio of 4:3, or else the quality of your video will be lowered! This is optimal for video playback.

Use high quality encoders for high quality videos! Fine examples include but are not limited to:

YouTube has two different viewing modes for watching videos – Normal mode, and Hi-Res mode. In Normal Mode, YouTube resizes your videos to 320×240 pixels, encodes them to Flash 7 at a data rate of approximately 250 kbps and compresses audio to mp3 (22.050 KHz, monophonic).

In Hi-Res mode YouTube creates 2 new copies of your video:

- 448×336 pixels, Flash 7 video @ 900Kbps. Audio @ 44.1KHz Mono
- 480×360 pixels, H.264 video @ 512Kbps. Audio @ 44.1KHz Stereo

Final notes

I hope this guide has helped you to create beautiful, high quality videos for YouTube. Watching blobs move around the screen wondering if it’s an animal or a person completely ruins the YouTube experience!

If this article helped you or you have suggestions of your own to share with the community, please leave a comment below!