Cartoon Video

[biferi]

I am making a Video Showing how to do all kinds of things.

It will be all Graphics and just my Vioce Over it.

I will be Posting it up on YouTube.

I will keep my RES. Set to 720x480 and my Frame Rate I will have Set to 24 FPS because it is all Graphics.

I am doing this to keep my File Size Small.

But what should I Encode my Video Bit Rate as?
I know Action Movies on DVD are around 10,000 Kbps.

So for a Graphic Show with no Action or Fast Scenes I was thinking 500 Kbps.

Can anyone help me?

[SaurusX]

Why bother keeping it small? YouTube is going to re-encode it anyway so it's better to make it as high quality as possible before they touch it with their grubby fingers.

[jagabo]

Bitrate requirements depend on what codec you use and the codec settings. Some material my required 10000+ kbps with MPEG 2 but with h.264 1/4 that amount may deliver the same quality. If your source is a slideshow (still images) you might be able to get away with as little as 100 kbps. Somew codecs have "constant quality" modes for cases like this -- you pick the quality you want and the encoder uses whatever bitrate is necessary to deliver that quality.

[LMotlow]

I will be Posting it up on YouTube.

I will keep my RES. Set to 720x480 and my Frame Rate I will have Set to 24 FPS because it is all Graphics.

YouTube won't post 720x480 frame sizes. Your video will have to be square-pixel 4:3 or 16:9 frames. If you don't know what that means, you'd better do some research. Try starting at YouTube's website to study their posting requirements.

[abolibibelot]

YouTube won't post 720x480 frame sizes. Your video will have to be square-pixel 4:3 or 16:9 frames. If you don't know what that means, you'd better do some research. Try starting at YouTube's website to study their posting requirements.

It will certainly accept it, the question is how it will display it. On YT there are many, many videos with a wrong aspect ratio, for some of them it may have been caused by the original file being uploaded in anamorphic DVD format (typically 720x480 or 720x576 in 4:3 or 16:9 AR) with their conversion engine failing to respect the aspect ratio flag.

But what should I Encode my Video Bit Rate as?

To preserve the quality as much as possible, the best method would be to export the video from the editing software in a lossless format (Lagarith, MagicYUV, UTVideo...), then compress the output with x264 (or any conversion utility based on x264 : ffmpeg, MeGUI, Handbrake...) with a good CRF setting (Constant Rate Factor), between 16 and 20 (16 being very high quality and 20 high quality, the lower the better, less than 16 would be overkill and more than 20 would start to result in a noticeable quality loss, since YouTube's compression engine will degrade the quality anyway as it's been mentioned already you should provide the best quality possible, while a lossy compression is still required to get manageable file sizes and uploading times, because it would be way too long to directly upload the lossless export unless it's a very short clip). That way you don't have to care about the bitrate, it gets adapted automatically depending on the complexity (from a computational point of vue) of the footage. You could create a batch file (simple text file saved with a .bat extension) with a ffmpeg command to compress all those videos with the same parameters (it can be tweaked if needed) :

FOR %%F in (*.avi) DO ffmpeg -i "%%F -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -preset slower -c:a copy "%%~nF.mkv"

(This will work if ffmpeg.exe is in the same directory as the .bat file and the .avi files. Otherwise you have to replace "ffmpeg" by the complete path and name of the executable, or put its location in the global Windows "PATH" if running on Windows.)

[manono]

YouTube won't post 720x480 frame sizes.

MPGs and VOBs, it won't, but other source codecs it will.

[biferi]

Well forget the Video I am making for now.

Say I Take a Video with my Camcorder at 16:9 Ratio 720x480 and it is 29.97 FPS.
And it Takes this as MPEG 2. Format.

If I go to Upload it to YouTube will it not take it?
Or must I not change the Format by Re Encoding it?

[manono]

If I go to Upload it to YouTube will it not take it?

It'll accept it and it'll resize it.

[jagabo]

Will it do anything sensible with the interlacing?

[manono]

Will it do anything sensible with the interlacing?

Although I've uploaded MPGs made from DVD VOBs, I've removed the pulldown and they were 100% progressive 23.976fps. I can't answer that question from personal experience. However, having seen a ton of interlacing on YouTube, my educated guess is it'll leave the interlacing alone.

It's a good point, though. If the videos biferi's camcorder makes are interlaced, I think he'd best deinterlace them. Or, at least upload a short one as a test first.