Web uploading 2

Introduction | Downloading Super© | Using Super© | Embedding

Uploading to YouTube and Google-Video

So you have prepared your video by reducing the picture size and compressing it (see the links at the foot of this page for details of what this entails). Now to get your movie onto the web.

Create an account

Create a free account with YouTube (http://uk.youtube.com) or Google (http://video.google.com). When you have filled in the online forms head for the video section. You will find a page with an "upload" button on it.

YouTube:	Click on the arrow beside the button to reveal two options - use "Video File" the other is intended for capturing from a mobile phone.
Google:

Both services offer several ways to upload videos but the simplest is to click the "Browse" button and navigate to wherever the prepared file is on your computer. Click the button to start the upload and off it goes.

YouTube:

YouTube is happy for you to click "Upload Video" to start the process off at once. You can fill in other details like title and description later.

Google:

Google does not offer you an "Upload Video" or "Go" button until further down the page. It wants you to fill in title and description first.

It takes some time to upload. Both services have a range of options for describing your film and adding "tags" - words people might type to find your movie. It is worth taking time to get these right. You can start work on them while the video is uploading.

YouTube:	The Title field defaults to the name of your video. It is usually better to give it a fresh title which will catch people's eye.
Google:	The Description field is text which will be beside the video. It is useful to give details that may be helpful or interesting to viewers.

YouTube:	Tags - take your time to choose helpful tags. It may even be worth including some common mistypes like "vido" and "flim". Category - choose from the list which appears when you click the arrow. Privacy - for most purposes leave this on the first setting.
Google:	Genre and Language - choose from the lists which appear when you click the arrows. Access - for our purposes leave it on "public".

You usually also have to tick a box agreeing to the terms and conditions of the company.

After uploading, the service has to process your video. Often this happens within a few minutes but can take much longer.

After Uploading

Once the "success" message appears you are presented with further options such as whether you will allow people to embed your movie in their own websites and blogs and whether to let it be shown on mobile phones and iPods. Both services have privacy options so that you can, for example, upload a movie and only allow your friends or family to watch it. Geoff Harmer used such a facility when adding music to his successful film Overtime. Only the composer, working in another country, had access to the rough-cut film. Later Geoff uploaded the complete movie and made it public.

For our purposes public access is usually best. Other options which let people comment on or vote on your movie may be less valuable and we suggest you say no to them. Silly comments are commonplace and unhelpful.

On both services you can find beside the finished file an "embed" option. Click this to reveal some strange looking code. Your webmaster can copy this and paste it into the code for a page on your club website. When that page is opened - hey presto - your video appears there.

Like so many internet things it sounds complicated, but when you have done it once, it becomes easy.

Note to webmasters

Google's embedding code tends to be short and sweet with little room for tweaking.

YouTube is a bit fancier:

width and height - we show these in bold red type here for clarity - they indicate the size the movie will appear on your website. You can change these figures provided you keep the right ratio and change both to the same size. The height is 25 pixels more than you might expect, but this is to allow for the playback controls on the display.

urls - in the middle of the code you will see two URLs starting <"http://www.youtube.com followed by a long string of characters. A useful trick here is to add '&ap=%2526fmt%3D18' (without the quotes) just before the "> at the end of each URL. In this case it would make those lines read:

This offers the movie in the higher quality.

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