If you capture video in HD you might find that uploading it to Youtube could take what seems like the rest of your life! It’s probably worth the wait if it’s an important marketing video that you aim to use in your business, but if its for something where the quality can afford to go down a little in the interests of quickness then here’s a good way to upload a video much faster.
If you have a Mac you will probably have or can get Screenfow. It’s a really handy piece of software for recording movies of your screen – animated presentations or anything else that’s happening. You can also add video to it as you record or afterwards however and this offers loads of possibilities – split screen presentations for example – and of using it as a video convertor to reduce the size of video content.
Using Screenflow As a Video Convertor
Open a blank document in Screen flow
Use the Media button to open your files
Select your video and hit add media
Drag the video into the main edit area
Use the side and corner handles to adjust it
Trim any crap from the start or end
Export it using these settings
Upload video to Youtube
Instead of a 5 minute HD video upload to Youtube now taking 200+ minutes it should take about 15-20. There is a slight loss of quality but to anyone watching that’s not an AV engineer this is neglible. I have notice that if you upload the exported direct to Facebook the quality does deteriorate a lot but even at that its still watchable
As with everything if you want the best quality possible you need to spend the time. You would also have made sure the video was well lit, had good sound and was well edited. There are loads of times though when you would rather do something a little more off the cuff where a more lo-fi approach is fine – maybe even desirable. This is a great time saver when you simply want to upload a video now.
