How to make HD 720p widescreen YouTube videos

HD is totally the new hotness right now. Everyone plus their moms is doing HD videos. True PRO INTERNET USERS are filling their YouTube accounts with vlogs talking about their inane failure at relationships, but now thanks to HD video on YouTube, you can see their acne pitting and armpit sweat stains where once you had only an active imagination and an inkling that their women problems might stem from possible personal hygiene issues. But now, you know for sure!

So you’re reading this because you clearly want to get in on the hot high def action, but probably aren’t sure how to go about it.

Alright, kiddos – it’s tutorial time. Doing HD 720p videos is actually super easy – you probably only need to change a couple things from the way you normally output your crappy videos. But it seems super gnarly because it uses a lot of new terminology – terminology that often gets misused by idiots so you just get more confused. People, especially the unwashed internet masses, misuse words and acronyms all the time, so it’s up to the ol’ F. Wong to cut a swath through the jungle of misappropriated terminology and give it to you straight.

First, we gotta clarify some terms.

What is an HD video?

HD stands for “high-definition” (and “hard drive” when you’re not talking about video and “Harley Davidson” when you’re not talking about nerd stuff). But to define high definition we need to first define definition so we have a baseline definition to base our definition of high definition on!

We should talk about the counterpart to HD, which is SD, or “standard definition.” SD video is the resolution (or how many pixels wide by how many pixels tall) of video that plays on a standard television set. What your regular ol’ DV camera shoots is also standard definition. The stuff you’ve uploaded to YouTube in the past is either SD or lower – 640×480 or 320×240 probably. That’s fine – but you want your videos to be HD now.

HD video comes in a few different flavors, but the one that YouTube supports and plays is 720p. 720p means 1280 pixels wide by 720 pixels tall. The “p” stands for “progressive” as in “progressive scan” which is more than you really need to know. If you care, keep reading here.

Here’s what you need to know: If you want to upload an HD video to YouTube, your video dimensions need to be 1280 pixels wide and 720 pixels tall. That’s it. The YouTube Upload Robots read the dimension of the image, and that lets them know to prepare the video so you can have the “Watch in HD” link at the bottom.

Here’s a comparison between HD and SD sizes – keep in mind it’s not full size:

Look at all that more explosion!

Why are there vertical black bars on both sides of my videos?

This has to do with a little thing called aspect ratio. 720p has a 16:9 aspect ratio. All that means is for every 16 pixels of width, you get 9 pixels of height. This is basically rectangular. Standard definition televisions, and all of the old content on YouTube has a 4:3 aspect ratio, which is basically square. So what happens when you put a square inside a rectangle? This does:

See how the 4:3 image can’t fill everything up? That’s why the black vertical bars are there – to fill in the rest of the space.

What is bitrate?

In simple terms, think of bitrate as how much data is crammed in an amount of time. The common measurement is kbps, which stands for “kilobits per second.” What does this mean?

Here’s a quick rundown of the terms you should know. I’m not explaining this twice so read these line by line until you get it.

Bit – The smallest unit of measurement in computers. It is either a 1 or a 0. To use a money analogy, think of a penny. One cent. The smallest coin you’ll encounter in US currency.

Byte – The next step up. Random text files on your computer are probably in the size of bytes. One byte = 8 bits. (To continue the money analogy: it’s like how a dime is ten pennies)

Kilobyte – The next step up – for our purposes let’s just say a kilobyte is a thousand bites (kilo- being a prefix for “thousand” so a kilometer is a thousand meters, a kilogram is a thousand grams, and a Kiloman is a typo of a common soy sauce). If you want to be snarky, a kilobyte is actually equal to 1,024 bits, due to base-2 weirdness, but you didn’t come here to get nerdgasmed so we’re just going to say it’s about a thousand. The terrible JPEGs you download are in kilobytes.

Kilobit – Read this one again. Kilobit. A thousand bits – not bytes. If you’re confused by this you shouldn’t be ashamed. I had to explain this quietly to a man whose job dealt with this difference (and who was, I might add, getting paid way the hell more than I was). THIS is what download speeds and kbps deals with – NOT! KILOBYTES PER SECOND. KILOBITS.

Which one is bigger? Kilobytes or kilobits? Well – a byte is eight bits. So a thousand bytes (a kilobyte) is equal to 1,000 times 8 bits in every byte, which means a kilobyte is about 8,000 bits. A kilobit is a 1,000 bits. So kilobytes are bigger – 8 times bigger in fact.

When acronymed, the difference is subtle – kbps is kilobits per second. kBps (notice the capital) is kilobytes per second. So when someone brags about their 512 kbps cable internet, that doesn’t mean they can download 500 kilobytes a second – it’s 512 kilobits per second, which (thanks to the power of math) means they’re downloading at about 62 kilobytes per second.

So now that the technical crap is out of the way, let’s talk about a hypothetical 30 second HD video we want to upload. What bitrate, or what kbps should we set it at? This depends. A high bitrate means that for every second of video, you’re cramming tons of data in it, which means it’ll look better but be a bigger file on your hard drive. A low bitrate means that for every second of video, you’re not putting as much data in it, which means it’ll look worse but be a smaller file on your hard drive.

In general, 3000 kbps is a good number to start with for HD video. If it needs to look better, bump it up to around 4000 kbps. If it’s too big a file, bring it down to about 2000 kbps.

Remember! Bitrate has nothing to do with dimensions – they measure different things. To have the HD option, YouTube is looking at your dimensions – how tall the image is versus how wide.

Alright how do I get a video up?

In whatever program you’re using, export your video at 1280 pixels x 720 pixels. Also, since you’re uploading your video to the internet and probably don’t want to sit there all day, you’re going to have to compress your file using a codec. Look for MPEG-2 (.mp2), MPEG-4 (.mp4), or h.264 as options – all are sleek modern compression schemes that YouTube happens to like. Keep in mind you might have to use a Custom export option in whatever program you’re using.

That’s really it!

YouTube’s guide is another decent reference.

What if I don’t want the side black bars on my video, but I only have a 4:3 image?

Compromises have to be made. You’re trying to turn a square into a rectangle. There are two ways you could do this. Some people streeeetch the square to fill in the sides. That tends to look kind of like ass, as you can see below:

Odds are you’ve seen this stretching before because most people with widescreen TVs playing back regular television (which is square) will have the image stretched to fill the frame. These people hardly deserve life itself, let alone their Walmart widescreen TVs. Don’t do this. If I come to your house and you’re doing this, I’m pissing in your sink because clearly you have neither taste nor regard for common decency.

The only real option you have (that is, if you don’t want me pissing in your sink) is cropping. You basically cut off the top parts of the image to make it 16:9 rectangular. It looks like this:

Notice here though that because we’re losing vertical resolution by cutting off the tops and bottoms, we’ve had to zoom in a little bit. But this way, you don’t get a distorted image.

I should add that if you have an HD camera, this won’t be an issue because HD is by definition 16:9 wide. This problem might come up if you’re recording, say, game video, or have SD footage you want to fill YouTube’s 16:9 frame. Most of the time, you can do this by reimporting your square video into your editing program, and set the project aspect ratio to 16:9. Then it’s a matter of positioning your original square video inside the rectangular frame, effectively cutting off the tops and bottoms.