When it comes to making YouTube videos, render settings is a guessing game. Lots of opinions are floating out there about how to render a video that will look good on YouTube. There are few things as nasty as spending hours editing your video, hours rendering it and then lo and behold when you upload it to YouTube, it looks like scum. Horrors.

So these are the settings for Sony Vegas that I use. I discovered them by trial and error and I hope they work for you.

First, if I’m working with widescreen footage, these are the Sony Vegas properties (File>Properties) that I use:

Then for rendering my widescreen footage choose the WMV type and click the “custom” button:

Under custom settings, you have a couple of tabs. Under Project set Video Rendering Quality to “Best,” under Audio set as  ”CBR” & 128 kbps and under Bit Rate set only Internet/Lan as checked and type in “5 M” as the target bit rate. One tab we skipped was the Video tab, so go to it now and fill in these settings:
 

Be sure to save your custom WMV template so that you can reuse it later. Upload your video to YouTube and after a bit of processing time YouTube will give your video the “HQ” option.  Whether you watch in “HQ mode” or not is up to you: either way the video should look great.  (Sample videos I’ve made using these settings.)

I use these render settings for my fullscreen video footage too, so it’s not restricted to only widescreen footage.  Let me know if this works for you.

Bring your suits and ties. This Bonus Tuesday was all about formal clothes, pictures, pictures, and more pictures. For the group activity we did a cool thing called MadLibs. Then we switched over to “interview mode” and interviewed Little Red Riding Hood. For a finishing touch, we sang some songs, waved, and said “goodbye” ya’ll!  Special moment at 44:00 when Dave and I show a video of us filmed back in 1997. We were young. Here’s the recorded footage: Read the rest of this entry »

IMO, Picasa is the best photo management program out there. If you have a digital camera, you should have Picasa, as it will allow you to sort, send, edit, crop, print, and share all your pictures. (It’s also free.)

This tutorial shows how to use Picasa to upload pictures to an online album. At the end of these steps, you will be able to select certain pictures, upload them to an online album, and send the link to friends to view the photos. For example, I uploaded the pictures of a recent conference held in Brazil, SA.

Here are the steps: Read the rest of this entry »