YouTube 101: Getting Started

You think that you should try YouTube but don’t know where to start? Well, listed below are just a few things you need to know to get your video in order.

Putting Video on You Tube

Name & Password
Create an account

Video Format
YouTube accepts video files from most digital cameras, camcorders, and cell phones in the .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG file formats.

Uploading Your Videos to YouTube
Once you’re happy with your final result, you’ll need to save the video in a format that YouTube can accept in order to upload. Unless you’re a professional video producer, we recommend that you save your videos as either QuickTime .MOV, Windows .AVI, or .MPG files— these are the most common formats and they work well within our system. We specifically recommend the MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at 320×240 resolution with MP3 audio. Resizing your video to these specifications before uploading will help your clips look better on YouTube.

Quick Time
Files saved with a .mov extension are QuickTime movies. They are often created by iMovie on a Mac, but other video editing programs can also save in this format. QuickTime .mov files can be uploaded to YouTube without any additional conversion.

Common Errors
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/topic.py?topic=10562

Video Search Optimization
1. Make sure your tags are relevant to your content.
2. More tags is more better.
3. Spread your tags out among your clips.
4. Use adjectives, adjectives, adjectives. Browsers use adjectives to find their view.
5. Have some category descriptor tags. It’s important to remember YouTube’s default search settings are Videos, Relevance and All Categories.
6. Match your title and description with your most important tags.
7. Don’t use words like “and” or “to.”

Using YouTube Media
At Metric Thunder we are using YouTube to increase interest in the website by showing YouTube videos on a selected day. We call it YouTube Tuesday and it highlights a few videos that we find interesting: