Uploading Widescreen Videos on YouTube

Let’s take a break from the organic Google stuff for a while and focus on a tool that’s recently been acquired by Google–YouTube. For some reason, I personally think uploading videos to YouTube is easier than it is to upload on Google Video. And perhaps for this reason YouTube has grown to be more popular than Google Video. So popular that Google decided just to buy it instead of compete head-on (for $1.65 billion at that!).

Anyway, one difficulty in uploading videos on any video service is the screen aspect ratio. You would usually expect videos to be in the standard 4:3 ratio, usually in the 640×380 or 320×200 pixel standards. This is traditionally what a computer screen could handle, although these days widescreen monitors and laptops are fairly popular. So are widescreen television sets. And since movies are shot and shown in the theaters in widescreen, you usually miss out on a lot of detail if you view in a “regular” 4:3 aspect ratio.

Here’s a nifty guide I came across.

YouTube has a “viewport” size of 448×336 pixels, with an aspect ratio of 4:3. This is called “TV Screen” proportion or “Fullscreen”. There are different screen aspect ratios, however, and here are examples.

The fullscreen, 4:3 aspect ratio:

The widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio:

And the 2.35:1 cinematic/theatrical aspect ratio:

Now whatever the aspect ratio of images you upload on YouTube, the output will be in 4:3, which is the aspect ratio of the viewport. So when you upload videos that are widescreen, YouTube will automatically fit these into the viewport area, and you will get images stretched out of proportion (people look too thin, faces are elongated, etc.).

Sample stretched widescreen video:

You have two options of solving this: the letterbox technique, and pan-and-scan. Letterbox means you have black bars above and below the video. You will thus preserve the original aspect ratio of the video, while fitting it in the 4:3 viewport. The problem with this is that your actual video resolution will be smaller and hence viewers will see less detailed imagery. Pan and scan, meanwhile, means you maintain the original height, and the sides of the video are cropped off. This means better image detail, but you lose the images at the sides of the screen. So that’s a tradeoff!

An example of letterbox:

An example of pan-and-scan:

Next: How to resize videos on your desktop.