How should videos be formatted for a video contest using youtube?

April 29, 2012 10:01 AM

I'm organizing a video contest for a group I volunteer with but I don't know a whole lot about video formatting. I want to get people to email the videos to me and then I'll put them up on youtube for public voting. What should I say about quality, formatting and file type to make this possible/easy?
posted by emilyayn to Technology (6 answers total)

How long are the videos? If they're even a few minutes and you don't want them looking and sounding like mush, the files will be way too big to email.

Any reason you can't have the entrants upload their own videos?
posted by Cortes at 10:09 AM on April 29, 2012

Yeah, you want to avoid transcoding files twice. Youtube should handle most video formats without issue. If your entrants cannot upload the files themselves, consider using Mediafire or similar and just having them email download links to you.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 10:12 AM on April 29, 2012

As far as specific settings, check out YouTube's encoding suggestions.
posted by Cortes at 10:13 AM on April 29, 2012

Response by poster: Thanks! This is all very helpful!
posted by emilyayn at 10:21 AM on April 29, 2012

Seconding Cortes, getting pretty much any video through email requires making the video about as large as a postage stamp (i.e., not watchable). Either let them upload their own videos, or, if you want to post them all from the same account, follow Inspector.Gadget's suggestion and have them upload them to a file hosting site that you can then download them from. Beware, though, because many file hosting sites have size limits that in some cases may be smaller than your entrants' videos.

Good luck! Sounds like fun.
posted by mekily at 12:41 AM on April 30, 2012

There are plenty of free small cloud storage products that let regular people share up to 2-5GB for free, such as Dropbox, Sugarsync, Skydrive and the new Google Drive. (and about half a dozen others). Set up one of these, and then you can offer an affiliate link that people can choose to use (or not use) to set up their own, and share a large-ish video file with you. (The affiliate link will give you more space for free as each of them signs up, but if you feel uncomfortable with the affiliate scheme, and think it'll drive people away, then give them the option, at least, of not using your affiliate link.)

Anyway, at the end, you'll have your own dropbox (etc.) and you can share the original videos out, for example, if that's appropriate for the contest.
posted by Sunburnt at 6:39 AM on April 30, 2012