YouTube is currently the world's most popular video upload site and gets about 65,000 or more videos a day submitted to them. YouTube says that their videos account for 60 percent of all videos watched online and that their visitors spend an average of 17 minutes per session on the site. According to Nielsen NetRatings, YouTube has nearly 20M unique users per month.

So how do you get to join the party and have your videos online at YouTube? It's really easy. First you got to shoot, create and compress a video.

How to put your video on the web Making Internet Video - The Big Picture Make sure when you are done with your YouTube film, that you output it in the right format. YouTube will a variety of the most common video formats - QuickTime .MOV, Windows .AVI, or .MPG files. Not a problem, eh?

Video Formats for YouTube Here is the issue. Once your video is uploaded to YouTube, it gets automatically transcoded into Flash Video (FLV) with a size of about 320x240 pixels. The audio is converted to mono. Finally, the video is streamed out at about a 200 kb per second rate which, when compared to a DVD rate of about 8 megabits per second.




However, according to the people at YouTube, if you really want your stuff to look good, they recommended saving and uploading your video as a MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at 320x240 resolution with MP3 audio.

They also recommend 320x240 resolution (half screen size), MP3 audio and a 30 frames per second frame rate.

Also, as you are limited to a maximum 100-megabit file size and maximum a 10 minute length, a 1 minute 100 megabit file will look better then a 10 minute 100 megabit file. The more raw data you can send to YouTube, the better the flash compression process should be. If you are trying to impress and show off your video shooting and editing chops, you might want to cut your 6 minute video short into three pieces and send then as three standalone 100 MB files of two minutes each, rather than as one six minute 100 MB file.

You can upgrade to a Director account which will enable you to upload films longer than 10 minutes but you are still limited to 100 MB file size per upload.

The Director account also allows you to add custom items and logo on your Profile pages and a custom URL per video. (this means you can drive viewers to your personal web site and SELL your stuff).

Right now, you can only get a Director account when you first sign up for your YouTube account. That means if you already have a YouTube account, you need to sign up again with a different name. This will probably be fixed soon