Basic question about uploading to YouTube

[badlydrawnboy]

I recorded a screencast of a presentation I made in Keynote using ScreenFlow. The aspect ratio of the presentation was 1024x768. I did the presentation full-screen on a 23" LCD, so there was a lot of black space around it.

Of course YouTube now features widescreen player windows. So when I tried uploading my screencast directly from ScreenFlow, it looked awful. Black bars on the side, and distorted main area.

Is there anything I can do about this now? Or would it be best to go back and create a new Keynote presentation with the aspect ratio that YouTube likes, and re-record?

Thanks.

 

[vizfxman]

I don't think you should need to redo your screencast.

YouTube's suggested upload resolution is 640x480 - an aspect ratio of 1.33 which is the same ratio as 1024x768. So I'm really not sure why your original video is getting altered once it hits YouTube. Have you tried resizing your video to the 640 size and uploading that?

Also, I'm curious about the black space around your video. Is your monitor resolution set higher than 1024x768 and it's just centering the video?

Not sure any of that will be a help.

 

[badlydrawnboy]

I'm not sure why. Is there some setting on YouTube in my account that defaults the viewer to HD, even if the video I'm uploading is 1.33 ratio?

I'll try resizing later tonight and uploading again.

 

[vizfxman]

I'm not sure why. Is there some setting on YouTube in my account that defaults the viewer to HD, even if the video I'm uploading is 1.33 ratio?

Not that I know of.

Is there a possibility that ScreenFlow is uploading the video with an incorrect aspect ratio? I'm not familiar with that program.

Have you tried uploading your 1024x768 file directly to your YouTube account through their site?

 

[badlydrawnboy]

This is very strange. I'm not uploading from Screenflow. As a test, I just exported the 1024 x 768 video as a 640 x 480 from Screenflow. I then converted it to .swf using VisualHub, and uploaded it directly to YouTube using the YouTube web interface.

Still has black bars on the side. Still appears in an HD player window, even though it's not HD.

I'm confused.