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iMovie to Youtube 1080p video uploads

Hi Gary, recently ive started to upload 1080p videos onto my youtube page but after doing all the editing on iMovie, they take forever to upload on Youtube by either the share option(something like 10+ hours) or by extracting then uploading onto Youtube(around 9-10h).
The videos vary in time but mostly are between 7-13 minutes depending on the footage taken.
What extracting settings would you recommend to get the best video quality but also the less time taken to upload onto Youtube.
The footage taken is in AVCHD which then converted into mov when uploaded onto iMovie. The current way im extracting is export > share using quicktime & in settings i use “HDV 1080p30”

Thanks for all the help and the videos you upload.
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Carlos M

Comments: 4 Responses to “iMovie to Youtube 1080p video uploads”

    13 years ago

    What size are the files? That's what determines the upload time. That, and your ISP's uploading bandwidth.
    A 10-minute video at 1080 could be huge, depending on a number of factors. 10 hours is very possible, yes.
    I would stick with these same settings in iMovie, and then use MPEGStreamclip to compress the movie further, while keeping it at 1080. Export as MPEG4, using H.264 compression. Then your "Limit Data Rate" setting is the critical one. You can see what size the video will be just by this. A 2 Mbps video is literally 2 Mbps -- which translates to around 15 megs per minute. Try different settings (2 Mbps, 5 Mbps, etc) and see what quality level is acceptable to you. Do the math to figure out the upload time. For instance, if your original video was 500MB and it took 10 hours, then a 50MB file should take 1 hour.
    Also, of course, consider getting more bandwidth. If you plan on uploading a lot of 1080p video, it would be worth it.

    Carlos M
    13 years ago

    The file sizes vary but after being converted to mov, the file sizes are typically 9-10gb, they are quite large.
    When I go into share > export using quicktime, Should i use the settings im still using, or use H.264? or export it into MPEG4 then use MPEG Streamclip? because the file will be exported in mov with either MPEG4 compression or H.264 since I cant find a way in iMovie to export the files in MPEG4 with H.264.

      13 years ago

      9-10GB is massive. I would never try to upload something like that to YouTube. By comparison, a DVD is 4-8GB.
      Don't use Share, Export Using QuickTime. Use Share, Export Movie. Then select the HD 1080p option That uses h.264. Alternatively, you CAN use Export Using QuickTime with MPEG4/H.264. Choose "Movie to MP4" and then Video Format: H.264 on the next screen. Either way, when you export from iMovie you can still compress it a little more with MPEGStreamclip. My videos (5 minutes, 720p) usually come out to 150MB using the Share, Export Movie from iMovie. But I get them down to under 100MB with MPEGStreamclip.

        Brett Burkhart
        13 years ago

        Thank you Gary, that was the information I was searching for. I was not considering the "Export Movie" option because it didn't give the granular control of the settings that "Export Using Quicktime" did. I'm converting a bunch of old 8mm video tapes, and I was having a lagging effect in my videos after exporting from iMovie (looked like a FPS issue), and using this method of export fixed it! I burned through a bunch of DVD discs trying every possible export and burning combination I could think, and this simple step solved my issue!

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