David Burch

Your Go-To Guy

HD Video on YouTube: Great Videos without buying a new Camera

by David Burch on February 8, 2010

Watch the Screencast

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Click on the image to watch the screencast.

How do I get rid of these black vertical bars without having to buy a HD camera?

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Here’s the problem: I have a Flip camera that takes 640×480 resolution video. It works great except for these black vertical bars on the side when I upload it to YouTube. This is a format problem that is very similar to the difference to the widescreen and full-screen formats when you rent DVDs. The new High Definition (HD) video cameras support shooting in this wider, format. But I don’t want to buy a new camera yet.

Edit and produce the video as a 1280×720 resolution file

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Compare those two images. Don’t you like the second one better?

This is really a 640×360 resolution zoomed in and produced as 1280×720

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This works if the shot works without some of the space at the top or bottom. In my case, I am starting out with a 640×480 resolution file, so I crop it to 640×360 resolution, one half of the desired resolution. This resolution actually works out quite well as it is YouTube’s default resolution. This is the default resolution, the one people will see if they do not click on the button to view it in high definition.

The Crucial Step: Import the file into the editor as a 1280×720 video

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Here I’m editing the video in Camtasia Studio. The crucial step is to change the resolution from 640×480 to 1280×720 when I drag the clip to the timeline for editing.

Didn’t we want to get rid of the black space?

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The editor fills in the extra space around my 640×480 video to obtain the requested 1280×720 resolution.

Camtasia’s Zoom and Pan feature to the rescue

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I use Camtasia’s Zoom feature to zoom in to a 640×360 area.

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I place the zoom box–yeah they probrably call it something else–over the part of the picture that I want to keep.

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The area outside of the green box will be discarded when the editor “zooms” in to fill the 1280×720 screen with the 640×320 contents of the green box.

View the end result

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I then produce the video in HD format and upload to YouTube. Here’s the end result on YouTube. I suppose it’s not True HD video, but it works nicely for video on the web.

Please rank it highly if you found these instructions and the accompanying screencast useful.

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