Youtube tricks?

[furtech]

I've been trying to figure out why my YouTube videos look so grainy and dark, while other videos (not the sponsered ones) look so much cleaner and with fewer artifacts (like that mosaic-like compression). Here are two examples:

Nice and clear-- no mosaic artifacts


My video-- blurry and lots of mosaic-artifacting.

Is there some technique for taking a regular AVI and tweaking it before uploading so that it is more clear and easier to see?

And just because I love my stupid dog:

The Dog Paddle Mystery!

Watch on YouTube

Even Apache was curious-- Rondo was so desperate and whimpery!
And then... And mystery solved!

Comments

[fishbliss.livejournal.com]

I think the problem is that you're posting an avi file.
That's not the native format for youtube - it's an old crappy
microsoft proprietary format.

YouTube used to use the ON2 codec exclusively, I think they're now moving
(thanks to the iphone, among other things) to the open standard H.264 format.

So I think the problem is in the source material you are providing.
The closer you make it to what YouTube will present, the less mucking
with it they'll have to do, and the nicer it will look.

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=55744&topic=10523

[furtech.livejournal.com]

Oooo...knowledgeable answer *plus* a link! Fantastic!

I'll have to see if there's a good .avi to ON2 or H.264 format converter out there for the Mac!

Thanks!

[fishbliss.livejournal.com]

Forget ON2. That's yesterday's news.

Better than converting is getting a camera that takes H.264 (aka, MPEG4) video
directly. Get away from avi all together.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

Yup... I see the compression issue too.. thank goodniss for bliss fish!