Would anyone here care to help someone Mac based with YouTube?

[MrMickeysMom]

Let me explain, first, cause I only occasionally visit the MUG (hello! :hi: )

I'm a newly elected council person in local municipality. Prior to entering local govt, I've always used my personal Macintosh to produce digital video (PowerBook G4, still in Jaguar). Because increasing transparency to the residents is a priority in letting them know what's going on, I've met with the municipality's department who produce live video for the govt channel of our meetings. I was in the studio yesterday. They have many things, most interesting, an updated Mac running Jaguar. I'd like them to be able to edit some meetings from the digital content they already burn and be able to upload these meetings to YouTube, thus increasing the on-demand ability of citizens to see meetings. This makes sense for the goal of more transparency in council meetings and not having to wait to see the few replays of the meeting on cable (if residents are lucky to even have cable).

From what I understand, YouTube is free and one only need to upload any number of video files, as long as they are not over (I think 10) GB. I wish I did this stuff, but I never uploaded anything from my Mac to YouTube. Therefore, I also don't know how to tell them how to do this (they meanwhile burn to a DVD for the library) how to know if one must know things like compression or other factors of that video before deciding how to proceed to chop it up into segments that can be uploaded (part 1 of 15, 2 of 15....).

They use the application iDVD, which I'm guessing is the one needed to do this editing of size content. Our municipality has an IT department (they are PC based, don't know Mac at all) who provide the municipality's website with a link for citizens in our municipality, once uploaded.

I just don't know the steps in between! Please, can anybody help point me in the right direction?

Thank you.... I'm trying not to whine for my shortcomings here, but I've been pretty saturated with all things municipality and trying to be a good council person, e.g., part of the solution.

:-) MMM

[NoQuarter]

1. First, update to Leopard.

Jaguar (10.2.x) was followed by Panther (10.3.x) which was followed by Tiger (10.4.x) which was followed by Leopard (10.5, currently at 10.5.6). Not being snarky here, but Jaguar really is ancient history. The OS has progressed light years from there.

Once you get to Leopard, YouTube upload is already built into the applications most likely to produce content for upload to Youtube - iMovie or iPhoto (for slideshows with voiceover, for example). The compressions are all taken care of in the app. No real specialized tech skills are needed. All you need is a YouTube account.

[MrMickeysMom]

3. I have to correct myself ... the municpality has Leopard installed already-

No, I understand about Jaguar and agree, but I meant to say I had it and the municipality has Leopard. I must have been tired when I wrote that.

Anyway, it sounds as if iMovie would work. But meanwhile, what do you think of the advice from another Mac user who answered below after asking her about using iDVD...

I've uploaded a bunch of videos to YouTube. I created them using Final Cut Pro. I've never used iDVD, but I'm sure that there is a File menu item within iDVD that says Export or Export As. You need to save the video to a format, such as mp4. There might even be a way to Save it for Web Broadcast. Save that file in your Mac - maybe in the Movies area. Then, you go to the YouTube site and create a free account. You can go to the menu that says Upload a Video. The menu will allow you to Browse your system and find the converted video file. From there, you just click Upload. The video has to be no longer than 10 minutes in length, or a total of 1 GB. But once your video is converted to the mp4 format, it will be small enough that you shouldn't have any problem. But if your original video is too long, you'll have to break it into segments and save each segment as a separate file. Then, you can name them part 1 of 4, etc. As you know, the quality of videos on YouTube is rather poor.

[MagickMuffin]

5. I use FCP 5.2 on my G4 PowerBook and have uploaded videos to Youtube

From what you've written in the box sounds about right.

Here's the info from Youtube:


About Uploading

* Upload up to 10 videos at a time
* Best video formats for YouTube
* Up to 1 GB in size.

Need more help? Visit the YouTube Handbook


Uploading Your Videos to YouTube

Once you're happy with your final result, you'll need to save the video in a format that YouTube can accept in order to upload. Unless you're a professional video producer, we recommend that you save your videos as either QuickTime .MOV, Windows .AVI, or .MPG files— these are the most common formats and they work well within our system. We specifically recommend the MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at 640x480 resolution with MP3 audio. Resizing your video to these specifications before uploading will help your clips look better on YouTube.



I hope this helps:hi:

[MrMickeysMom]

9. Thank you... It's bound to help this guy

... and tough doing things from my end to his TV studio, but I know we can do this.

:-) much appreciated!

[NoQuarter]

6. iMovie will do nicely for you.

I use Final Cut Express quite a bit. It gives you more possibilities in the editing department, but lacks direct upload to YouTube.

iDVD is simply for putting a DVD together - not a video editing app.

[MrMickeysMom]

10. Thank you!

[NoQuarter]

7. The video quality has improved significantly.

But as with all things, it can only be as good as the source material.

[MrMickeysMom]

8. Okay, I've cleared up my brain a little and have a follow up question!

And, for some reason, I didn't recall I had Panther 10.3.9, but that's another story.

Meanwhile, the problem I wanted to solve was the TV studio of the municipality being able to upload our meetings to YouTube...

They have a t-1 line connection to their TV studio's Mac for the internet, and they have a Mac described as 2x3 GHZ dual core Intel xeon 4GB 667MHZ. In practice, the tv guy has used Final Cut Pro to edit his DVD of the meeting. He experimented with making an 8 minute segment of one of our meetings, but it took him 20 minutes to upload that 8 minutes. Ugh.

Apparently, the t-1 connection (I can't think of any other reason) made it the time factor tedious. Would there be any other reason, or any advice you have on cutting down the time it takes to upload?

Thanks again.

[moggie]

2. I don't think you should connect a Jaguar system to the Internet

As NoQuarter says, upgrade. I don't think Apple has released security updates for Jaguar since 2004, so it's probably rife with exploitable security flaws.

[MrMickeysMom]

4. I've did some security updates up until this last year (???)

and Jag seems to suite my current needs, which includes e-mail, internet, Skype and the Office apps I use.

Admittedly though- I'm saving up my bread to update, replace a battery and then system update.

Thanks for the warning!