Need help in how to upload high quality videos to streaming sites

[Khryz]

I have the EyeTV 250 Plus, and I have been recording some of my video games onto my computer so that I can edit them and make some cool machinima videos. However, this is my first time editing a movie so that I can upload it to a site, such as Gametrailers, YouTube, etc.

The EyeTV can capture the video obviously in a wide range of qualities. I'm looking for a middle ground, as the Extended Play encoding option has good quality and doesn't require lots of storage, I would use that - because even that looks better than the quality of videos I find on YouTube, or even more sites such as Gametrailers that support higher quality videos.

Even so, should I still record in the Highest Quality setting? I know that when you upload it the site compresses everything so everything becomes worse anyway, so starting with the highest quality possible will ensure the highest quality after all compression - but is that really necessary?

I just don't want to record in High Quality only to have it all be wasted space after I upload it, whereas Extended Play would have saved me more space.

Any thoughts?

Lastly, what's the best file type to use to export it? H.264? Quicktime? MPEG-4? DV? Not sure what most sites seem to respond best too.

 

[bigbossbmb]

You need to find out what codec these Presets are encoding to. If you can get them to encode in DV, great. If not, you'll probably have to convert the files after you capture them so that whatever editing app your using will be able to cut them.

when you're done editing, export to h.264.

 

[Khryz]

I'm not sure. This is what it says under Encoding:

2.7 GB per house DVD-compliant MPEG-2
Video: 720x480, 29.97 fps, 6.0 Mbps VBR (8.0 Mbps max), IBP frames
Audio: 48.0 kHz, 284 kbps

That is with Encoding on the highest preset quality setting. When I record them, the recordings have the .eyetv file type. Then from there, you export it. So you're recommending I export it to H.264? If I do that, then when I put it into iMovie the quality gets worse.

 

[bigbossbmb]

No, I said export to h.264 when you are finished editing.

Ok, the files you are getting are MPEG 2, which is already very compressed. You need to get the files into the DV codec so that iMovie will edit it. I haven't worked with eyetv files, so I don't know what will open them.