Guide To HD Youtube Videos

This guide should hopefully help you through the processes of how to render a video in Sony Vegas in high definition for Youtube. This guide is made for Sony Vegas 7 on Windows 7, but should work fine for most other recent versions of vegas and other windows operating systems.

Step 1 – Prepare the project before any editing

1. The first thing you should do is open up Sony Vegas and create a new blank project.

2. Go to File -> Properties to open up the project properties.

3. Change the settings to match those in this image.

Note: Make sure you check the box at the bottom, this will save the settings for all future projects, meaning you only need to do this once.

4. Click ok and you can now edit your video!

Step 2 – Make sure you edit the clips to fit the project size

Chances are you do not record your videos at the same resolution you will be editing/rendering at, so you will need to alter each and every clip in the video if you want to remove letter-boxing from them (the black lines surrounding the video).

1. Drag your clip onto the timeline

Tip

Note: Notice the black lines at either side of the video, we will need to get rid of these or they will end up in the finished video!

2. Adjust frame size of the video

Click on the cropping icon on the video clip

Resize the frame using one of the corners so you can clearly see what you’re meant to be looking at

You’ll notice the letterboxes are still there

So open the cropping again and this time hold CTRL while you drag one of the sides your letterboxing is on to stretch the frame to the size of your project

You can speed this process up later by saving this cropping as a preset, meaning in future you can just select it from the drop down menu at the top, then all you’ll need to do is resize the frame if needed.

Once this is done your preview should look something like this, with no ugly letterboxes!

You need to remove the letterboxing from every clip you use in the video, but if you do it as you go, then it shouldn’t be much of a hassle, especially with the preset frame ratio if you decide to save it.

Now onto rendering the video! Again, these are not the best possible settings, but they are absolutely fine for RuneScape videos on Youtube, the quality is great in both standard quality and high definition.

One error that a lot of people make when starting out in Vegas is they save the project file rather than rendering the project as a video file, ‘saving’ the video only saves a copy of what you’re doing in Vegas so you can come back to it later, it doesn’t create a new video file from it.

To render a new video file, you need to go to file -> Render as…

Click it and a window should open like this, under ‘save as type’ select windows media video V9 (*.wmv), then click ‘custom…’

Note: Make sure to copy the areas marked with a star

Now you can edit the rendering quality options, just copy these settings

Once you’ve done that, give it a name/description of your choice and save it as a new custom preset, so you don’t have to do this again.

Click ok and make sure you have your template selected from this drop down menu, name your video file and click ‘save’

Your video should now start rendering, this process will use up a lot of your computer’s resources, so unless you have a very high performance computer anything else you try doing on it will lag like crazy. So it’s a good idea to just do something else while it is rendering, like watch TV, try on a kinky bunny outfit, seduce your milkman etc.

Your video may take a while to render, depending on how long the video is and how good your computer is, but once it is done you should be left with a decent high definition video ready to be uploaded to Youtube!

Example of a video rendered with these settings: