Tuesday, December 19, 2006

YouTube Advice

I just posted my first YouTube video. YouTube does an excellent job of making the upload process as painless as can be. I only ran into one big snag: the video file that my camera recorded was ginourmous, so ginourmous in fact that YouTube (rightfully) wouldn't accept it.

It turned out, the .avi file was over 150 Megs. YouTube has a limit of 100 Megs so I needed to do something if I wanted to post there.

I Googled around looking for suggestions from people as to how they typically compress their videos. Surprisingly, I didn't find much, until I eventually came across a reference to Windows Movie Maker.

Windows XP came through again!, It turns out, XP has its own movie software built in that steps you through the process of creating and compressing a movie. While no doubt not a slick as the Mac version, it was really workable and did just what I needed. And just like my discovery of the Windows Remote Assistance feature,Movie Maker had been there on the Start Menu all along.

So there you have it: if you have a digital camera that shoots .avi files and Windows XP, you should be all set to publish your next master piece on YouTube. Now there's nothing stopping you from being the next Steven Spielberg, or at the very least Senor Spielbergo.

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