If any of you have ever tried uploading a video to YouTube, you may well have experienced the frustration and despair of seeing your masterly-crafted piece of film-making being turned into an embarrassed facsimile of pixilation, ghosting and of sync audio. Oh the woe!

It doesn't help that YouTube's advice is rather vague, and yet tantalisingly straightforward. This is what they have to say on how to best format your video before uploading it:

We recommend the following settings:

- MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format
- 320×240 resolution
- MP3 audio
- 30 frames per second

Resizing your video to these specifications before uploading will help your videos look better on YouTube.

Sounds simple doesn't it? Well, you'd be surprised. The frame-rate and resolution bit was easy. But it took me hours of reading up, and I don't know how many different permutations of Google searches to find information on Xvid, MPEG4s and MP3s. And since, the info seemed spread out over a dozen different hard-to-find websites, I thought I'd lump it together and tell you how I solved the problem.

I used Adobe Premiere (6) to edit and compile my new video. It's an older version, but it checks out. At first, I saved out my movie at the highest possible quality AVI setting that still came in under the 100MB threshold that YouTube imposes. I watched it in all it's glory and clicked upload feeling jolly pleased with myself.

This was a mistake.

It all comes down to Codecs (short for encoders and decoders). I didn't know this at the time but not every AVI is the same. AVI is short for Audio / Video Interleave, which doesn't mean a great deal to me, apparently you can get dozens of different versions of AVI, and if the information isn't encoded just way YouTube likes it, it's going to pull your movie apart and reassemble it again in the format of choice - only you'll have lost all that lovely shininess and sparkle you invested valuable time to achieve.

It all comes down to being able to save out your AVI with MPEG4 video and MP3 audio, which is pretty tricky to do. Adobe Premiere couldn't do it. Not on it's own. When you go to export your movie, there are a number of settings you can alter, the audio and video encoders are the key here. But frustratingly, neither MPEG4 nor MP3 were options on the list.

This is where Xvid comes in. It's a free (open source) encoder that you can download from http://www.xvid.org/

Once installed, it seems to plug itself in to your editing program, so that when you go to save out your movie you now have the option of saving it as an MPEG4. Great!

But nothing on the MP3 front. For that I had to download another free program 'VirtualDub' it's a simple, but effective editor with the magic MP3 audio option needed to export my movie to YouTube. You can find it here: http://www.virtualdub.org/

So here's the process:

1. Opened my movie project in Adobe Premiere.
2. Saved it out using MPEG4 Xvid codec (in export settings) at a very high quality. - SEE HELPFUL PICTURE
3. Imported the movie in VirtualDub
4. Turned off the sound that came with it. - SEE HELPFUL PICTURE
5. Imported the sound as a separate file and lined it up with the video.
6. Set the audio export settings to MP3 (MPEG layer 3) at 56k bit rate. - SEE HELPFUL PICTURE
7. Set the video export settings to MPEG4, and used the little bit-rate calculator in the Xvid control panel to match the bit rate to the audio, this helps keep the sound in sync. - SEE HELPFUL PICTURE
8. Exported the movie.
9. Uploaded to YouTube!

Using MPEG4 with MP3 audio meant that my movie was now 10 times smaller in terms of MB, and yet the quality was the same. On top of that YouTube didn't mess around with it. When I watched it online, it was just as I had made it.

It's just a shame that in this particular case, my audio wasn't as good as it could have been, (I had to use my headphones as a mic!). But the principle works. I hope this is useful to someone!

Phew! I didn't know I'd be learning all that when I got up this morning!

P.S. Other useful tools I used in making the video - Audacity (a nifty free audio editor) with "Lame" [that's what it's called! I'm not just being rude] plugins.

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