For this tutorial, I’m going to assume that you readers have no money to spend on video editing software, and will be using the software that came free with your computers.

Video Formats
The two most popular video formats are .MOV and .WMV. The .MOV format is native to Mac computers, and iMovie will allow you to encode your video to HD. The .WMV format is native to Windows computers, and Windows Live Movie Maker (Windows 7) or Windows Movie Maker (for XP/Vista) will allow you to encode your video to HD.

YouTube prefers the .MOV format because it’s smaller, but accepts .WMV and some others. The quality of HD in both formats is great. The only time it wouldn’t be is if your camcorder or webcam takes crappy video. You have to put good quality in to get good quality out.

Method
Because I have a PC and not a Mac (sobs loudly ), I used Windows Live Movie Maker to encode/render an example video I made just for this tutorial. The final product is below. But, to show you how I did it, I used a screen recording program to record my steps and my vocal instructions. Because the tutorial video is pretty large, and just under 10 minutes long, I opted for encoding it in the .MOV format over the .WMV format since the former would result in a smaller file size.

Example Video

Tutorial

That’s it! It’s really not a complicated process. If you have any questions, leave a comment or use my contact form to reach me (see the menu bar).

Download the Custom Video File
If you want to get the 960×720p HD custom video profile (.prx file) to use with Windows Live Movie Maker and Windows Movie Maker (for XP/Vista) click this link to download.

How to Install the Custom Video Profile
Unzip the custom file. If you’re asked where to unzip the file, navigate to: C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Photo Gallery\Video Profiles and unzip it there. Start WLMM or WMM and it should be listed in the Save Move settings with the other profiles OR in another section called Custom Profiles (or something like that, I forget). Viola! That’s it. Happy videomaking!

Deuces!

Today is Friday and I’d love to go out and do something… maybe take in a movie at Atlantic Station, or something. But, I’ll be here at home near the bathroom. Yeah, it’s looking like it’s going to be one of those days. As for the remainder of the weekend, who knows. I’ll probably spend it doing YouTube videos and shopping online. I wonder if I can find a shoe sale…

They’ve kept the news quiet, but YouTube has finally started accepting the 960×720p HD resolution! This is huge because webcam makers like Logitech use 960×720p to record ¹ HD video, and until this happened these videos would not play in HD on YouTube.

What’s even better is that now I don’t have to hide a 960×720p video within a 1280×720p video by encoding the video at the higher resolution and letterboxing it. Now, I can just encode the video, like I normally do, and upload it. Way to go YouTube!

I started back video blogging, but yet AGAIN, I don’t know if YouTube is the right place for me to host my videos. I want to place my vlogs on this blog, but I don’t want to eat up my storage space by hosting them myself, so that’s where YouTube comes in. If I don’t want my videos accessible by anyone on YouTube, I can make them private, and embed them over here, so that’s not the issue either. The issue is that unless one is uploading a HD video, the quality of YouTube’s videos leave much to be desired – even with their new default high quality encoding.

When I record a video, before it’s uploaded to YouTube, it has to be encoded. By the time YouTube gets finished re-encoding it for their system, the quality has suffered. So, since I have to encode the videos no matter what I do, I’m thinking of just quitting YouTube and hosting the videos on my Silverlight hosting account.

I have a 10 gigabyte Silverlight video hosting account provided for free from Microsoft that is sitting unused. I could encode my videos for Silverlight’s specs and upload them there. The best part is that the Silverlight storage is just storage – my videos won’t be re-encoded resulting in a degradation in quality. The end result is SHARP, CLEAR videos of high quality.

Hmmm… I have some thinking to do.