YouTube help

[jgriffin]

It recently occurred to me that I could upload video clips from my camera to YouTube for my family to watch. Sadly, I have been messing with this all afternoon with little success. The first clip I uploaded finished uploading, only to have YouTube tell me I hadn't uploaded anything. Then I tried again, and my roughly 45 second clip is now only 4 seconds! :(

I am uploading .avi files from a Canon. Is there some pre-processing I need to do first, or am I just getting unlucky today?

TIA!

Jen

[searchdog]

I don't know anything about youtube, but thought I would pass on that I have had good luck with uploading videos from our camera to photobucket.com and then just sending the url to family and they have all been able to see them just fine.

[ErinMC]

Hi Jen,

I can't really help figure out the problem, but I've also uploaded avi files from our Canon to YouTube, and needed no processing. My family was able to watch them that night. Maybe there is a problem with the YouTube site itself tonight?

Erin

Mom to Chase 2/2004 and Logan 5/2006

[jgriffin]

I wrote to YouTube for help, and they seemed to think my file was not quite in the right format. I think I may take the movies at too high a resolution for their processor to handle, or something like that. I wound up running the clip through a program called Dr. Divx, which converts the .avi file to a .divx file, and compresses it at the same time. It's a bit time consuming, but since the resulting file is smaller the upload and processing time is reduced; in the end it's probably about the same.

[fattytuna]

How large is your avi file? Youtube takes clips of <100Mb.

I have a Canon SD450 and a Canon S3 that takes video clips in avi (m-jpeg codec). Because my clips are taken at a higher resolution, and usually lasts 2-3 minutes, the avi files usually end up being in the 300-400Mb range. So I've always converted them into mpegs, which is what youtube prefers, before uploading them, as the youtube upload file size has to be less than 100Mb.

You said your clip is only 45 sec long? That's not very long. But how large are the files? I would test a short clip taken in the lowest resolution (less then 100Mb in size) and see if youtube will take the avi as is - my guess is it should. Youtube prefers 320x240 mpeg4's, but it should be able to take .wmv, .avi, and .mov's. The are converted into Flash video file (FLV) anyway.

[ribbit1019]

I have a Canon SD800 and have .avi files saved on my hard drive. I am trying to transfer but need to convert them before I do and know little about converting these files. How does conversion work?

Also does anyone know of a program that I could rotate the clips I have? I have a nasty habit of holding my camera the wrong way (long side up) while I am recording and I have a couple of very cute clips I'd like to turn so they can be viewed normally instead on on their side.

Thanks for any guidance. Sorry for the Hijack Jen!


Christy
Wife to Richard
My Waterbabies
http://lilypie.com/pic/070228/Yrlv.jpg http://b3.lilypie.com/H-lkm5.png
http://lilypie.com/pic/070228/sSDo.jpg http://bf.lilypie.com/tkq-m5.png
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/steitzsmith/Other/jump.gif

[ribbit1019]

I have a Canon SD800 and have .avi files saved on my hard drive. I am trying to transfer but need to convert them before I do and know little about converting these files. How does conversion work?

Also does anyone know of a program that I could rotate the clips I have? I have a nasty habit of holding my camera the wrong way (long side up) while I am recording and I have a couple of very cute clips I'd like to turn so they can be viewed normally instead on on their side.

Thanks for any guidance. Sorry for the Hijack Jen!


Christy
Wife to Richard
My Waterbabies
http://lilypie.com/pic/070228/Yrlv.jpg http://b3.lilypie.com/H-lkm5.png
http://lilypie.com/pic/070228/sSDo.jpg http://bf.lilypie.com/tkq-m5.png
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/steitzsmith/Other/jump.gif

[jgriffin]

Christy -- I do the same thing way too often! I wish my camera had some little alarm or light to let me know that I'm holding it the wrong way.

I found this tutorial online:
http://travelhappy.info/travel-tips/how-to-rotate-a-camera-video-clip-from-landscape-to-portrait/

I haven't tried it yet, but this was the same blog where I learned of the software to convert my .avi files to .divx, so I think he knows what he's talking about. It sounds like an imperfect solution, but possibly better than nothing.

The conversion I did was really simple. It involves a program called Dr. DivX, and it converts the .avi file to .divx format (which compresses it at the same time). Getting Dr. DivX working on my computer was a bit of a challenge, as I had to download the latest divx codex from another site, but the Dr. DivX installer walked me through the first part of it.

I would try uploading some .avi files directly to YouTube first, as you may not have any problems at all. My files were under the 100M limit (but still pretty large), but for whatever reason YouTube wasn't happy with them.