Exporting, Uploading & Captions

Export settings

When exporting files for YouTube, use MOV or MPEG4 formats. Make sure the frame rate is set to “progressive” and not “interlaced.”

The video bitrate should be as high as possible (typically around 20-30 mbps). Audio should be encoded as AAC with a bitrate of at least 256 kbps.

If there is an option to “prepare for streaming,” use it. This will speed up the upload process immensely.

YouTube uploading

Give the video a name and description that accurately describe its content. For a UNT video, the category should almost always be “Education."

Give the video plenty of tags. Include tags that relate to UNT (unt, north texas, mean green, etc.).

Once the video has finished uploading, go to the video settings and make sure that commenting is permitted “by approval only.” It will not be set that way by default.

Closed captioning

YouTube has an automatic transcription tool for closed captioning (CC), but it typically doesn’t work perfectly. There are a few options for adding CC to your videos.

  1. Let YouTube automatically caption your video. This will result in mostly wrong words, but they will all be timed properly with the speech in the video. Download the caption file and adjust the transcription so it is accurate. Then upload the adjusted CC file to your video.
  2. Use CaptionTube to manually insert captions and apply them to your video.