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[Funk Thompson]

I think my YouTube videos turned out remarkably well, for an amateur, some of the videos I've made (in my, and several friends' opinions...) sound better than the live recordings on YouTube from SNL and such.

I offered assistance in the "Personal Bands" thread to a guy who posted a video of his band, which had such poor quality audio I couldn't tell what I was listening to.  This is a common problem with amateur music on YouTube and MySpace.

So i offered to help, and it seemed at least a few people were interested, so I'll share this with the masses:


Obviously, the first step is having a camera that actually does capture Audio well.  I bought a Panasonic SDR-H40P, and it does pretty darn well.  (Click the link in my sig for some samples if you want to verify that I know what I'm talking about - Consequence, Cycle of Creation, Text Slut, Johnny Walker, and Miss Ohio are some of the better recordings.)

Once you have a good source video, you need to convert it to a format YouTube or MySpace likes.  They do not like MPEG-2, nor do they like 2GB files.  So you need to compress and probably split the video.  But, as you are recording live audio, the quality of the audio is more important than that of the video. 

What you want to do is compress your video but leave the audio RAW / WAV.  Most cameras are going to record in raw MPEG-2, so use VirtualDub-MPEG as VDub itself doesn't like MPEG-2 streams.

Once you load the video into VirtualDub-MPEG, you go to the Video menu, select compression, and select XVid as your video codec.  Don't touch the audio.  Set your start and stop points in the video (if needed, you may have recorded only one song, or a whole set - if the latter, you'll have one big file you need to split each song or clip out of), and then select "Save as AVI..." from the file menu (you might want to first locate or move the "Output" folder so you know where to find the split clips.)

If the file is still too big, then delete the new .avi and go back to the compression options, there is a slider (under "advanced..." I think) for Quality / File Size.  Slide it towards the smaller file size end a bit, try it again, keep adjusting that slider till you have the file size you want.  It will look worse the farther to the right you go, but again you aren't affecting the audio quality.

This allows you to compress the video while leaving the audio alone, resulting in clips of similar quality to mine.

This all assumes your video camera captured the audio well to begin with, if the source video sounds like crap, there is nothing any program will do to improve it (that I know of.)

If anyone needs more detailed help, has similar advice, or just wants to tell me I'm a cocksocket, this be the place

[tommydski]

Oh huh, thanks for posting that. I'm pretty sure even if nobody uses this advice right away, I'll definitely bump this if anyone asks in the future.

I did actually make a couple of live videos for youtube recently and I was really disappointed with the results. Next time, I'll definitely be using this method.

[Funk Thompson]

Oh huh, thanks for posting that. I'm pretty sure even if nobody uses this advice right away, I'll definitely bump this if anyone asks in the future.

I did actually make a couple of live videos for youtube recently and I was really disappointed with the results. Next time, I'll definitely be using this method.

If you need help once you get to doing so, PM me.  It took me quite a bit of time to figure this all out and I'm very pleased with the results, as is the band I recorded.

[tommydski]

Thanks. This was taken from the last run of footage I took and as you can see, even ignoring the shoddy camera-work - transferring it to youtube made the sound and visuals pretty sketchy.

I don't do it very often but I figure that youtube is such an important way to get good music out these days, knowing how to do stuff like this is a big part of the battle. I've been sold on so many bands from seeing them on youtube, so it's good to have a working knowledge of the system.

[Funk Thompson]

I'll check that out when I get home - YouTube blocked at work

I discover most of my music via links to YouTube on forums like this

[sohcahtoa]

I made this video for a friend from his gig at a local coffeehouse.  I have a portable recording rig, so I used the audio from that instead of the camera audio.  I think it turned out pretty well, all things considered:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiAn769lF94

-E

[Funk Thompson]

If you have a good audio rig, and know how to use it, and know how to synch it up to a video file, you'll blow my videos away.

My vids are about the best you will achieve using a digicam - they came out good, but a lot of the sound gets lost in the mix so you don't always make out the guitar or drums or whatever.  They are far from perfect.

But they are, from what I've seen / heard, some of the best amateur live music available on YouTube as far as audio quality goes.  The quality of the music itself I'll leave as an exercise to the listener.