Posting a video to Youtube

Movie file sizes
We won’t cover movie editing here – that will be discussed in the next issue. But it’s a good time to talk about clip lengths and file sizes.

outube imposes a limit of 100MB on movies and while that might sound a lot, it corresponds to only a few of minutes of high-quality footage.

The same limit applies on Google Video, although bigger files can be transferred with the downloadable Google Video Uploader.

There’s a practical angle to this too. Each megabyte of data may take between one and five minutes to upload, depending on the speed of your connection, although we uploaded a 20MB clip to Youtube in about 10 minutes.

The only way to reduce the size of movie files so they meet the limits and upload more quickly is to reduce their quality. There are many clips lasting several minutes on these sites, but the quality is often poor. Video sites such as Youtube and Google Video are suited to short clips, not full-blown movies. Neither site imposes a limit on the number of movies you upload or their total combined size.

But what about privacy? While many users of these sites may suck up their 15 minutes of fame with relish, the rest of us might not want the details of our private lives broadcast to the world.

Don’t worry. With both sites it’s possible to restrict access to videos so that only those who have been specially invited or notified will know they exist.

With that in mind, we’ll go through the sign-up process to demonstrate how easy it is to get started.

Create an account
The Youtube and Google Video sites can be browsed at will by visitors. Spend a few minutes looking around to learn how the site’s laid out, see what other people have done and get a few ideas. But before you can upload any videos of your own, you must create a user accou

This is straightforward and requires little personal information beyond your name and email address. The email address is needed for a confirmation email, which contains a link you must follow to activate your account. This is measure used by many online service providers to prevent automated spamming systems from creating multiple fictitious user accounts. Youtube asks for a username and password, while Google Video uses your email address and a password. These are used in future to log on to the account.