The Sport of Exporting from Final Cut Express to YouTube

I can't be the only one who's had nightmares doing this. I mean spending countless HOURS exporting movies from Final Cut Express to the great YouTube Engine in the Sky with variations close to the near infinite possibilities available in search of the magic combination that crunches gigabytes into dust without turning your movie into mud.

Reminds me of the true story of some young aircraft engineer who wanted to know the meaning of the "PFM module" in the Boeing 747 blueprints. No one knew. But years later he tracked down an old engineer who could tell him what PFM stood for: Pure Fucking Magic.

So here we have the PFM module of the Mac exporting to the PFM module of YouTube and only God and his Super Geek Consultants know what happens in the mix.

Well, evidently God and the Geeks were replaced by Google.  Thank god...

The answer is now on the YouTube (owned by Google) Help pages which are a LOT more helpful than they used to be.

It's called "File format/editing tips for Apple users".

Data elsewhere says the key is to upload "as close to the original as possible". The more you alter it in the process of exporting, the harder time YouTube will have with it. For example, I used to first crunch it down through "Quick Time Conversion", THEN crunch it through some other compressor program like StreamClip or Handbrake. And sometimes I'd even change the original size or aspect ratio of the video--or worse, didn't even know what I had recorded it at. And I'd try and do other things as well, based both on what I'd find on the internet and my own trial and error.

Here's what YouTube help now says after exporting your edit through Quick Time Conversion (full context at the link above):

I did exactly what they say above EXCEPT I selected 29.97 for the frame rate because that was the actual frame rate I used. I seemed to work just fine.

What if you don't know what frame rate you shot at or what the original size of your video was?

That's easy.
Go back into Final Cut, Select a shot or sequence of your video in the Timeline, then go to the Edit drop-down menu, select "Item Properties" and the information will be right there.

Now, if you have Final Cut Pro, that's a different story. You'll get an even better product for YouTube using the Compressor program to make your MP4 video for export to YouTube.

ONE MORE THING:

In process of all this I did find another interesting and apparently related datum: The poster was talking about Firefox and it may be applicable to other beta browsers. He said that Firefox updates all your open tabs every 10 seconds and this can take it hit on the Flash program which manifests on your video play back as a momentary pause. All I can say is that I usually have a bunch of tabs open and I was getting the pauses and jerks on my videos playing back on YouTube.

So I shut down all the other tabs. No more jerks.

To solve the problem I just opened up another browser (Google Chrome) for video playback and left all my usual pages open on Firefox.

And by using the "Spaces" feature on the Leopard and Snow Leopard programs, you can set yourself up with 3 different browsers (if you add Safari to the mix) open that you can switch between instantly.

Anyway, I pass this along as it seemed to pan out as a factor at least when I tested it. And, as you know, in our desperation to achieve an acceptable YouTube playback quality, we tend to do ANYTHING, don't we?