Get Footage for Your YouTube Video
The first requirement in making a YouTube video is to have footage. Your content can be something original that you shoot with your phone, camera, or webcam. It might be a commercial, an old home movie, or a montage of photos you’ve taken. It’s a good idea to connect an external microphone to your recording device before recording. Using a good mic is one of the top audio tips to help you avoid poor sound quality.
Edit Your Video
Editing is optional, but a good idea if you want to make your video more compelling or easier to follow. You’ll probably want to keep most of your video, but there will be other sections (maybe even just a few seconds) that you want to delete from the footage. Instead of reshooting the whole video, you can use some free editing software to remove the sections you don’t want.
Set Up a YouTube Account
You need to have a free user account with Google before you can create a YouTube account/channel and upload videos to YouTube. If you already use Gmail, Google Photos, or any of Google’s other services, you can use this information to create your YouTube channel.
Make Sure Your Video Is the Correct Size and Format for YouTube
YouTube accepts a wide variety of video formats and resolution sizes, so you don’t have to be too concerned with upload settings. A larger, higher quality file will look better on YouTube, but a smaller file will upload faster. The supported YouTube file formats include MP4, AVI, FLV, WMV, MOV, WebM, and others. If your video isn’t in one of these formats, you can always use a free video file converter to save it to one that YouTube supports. Since YouTube’s videos display at a 16:9 aspect ratio, any other video size will have black boxes on either side to make up for that incorrect ratio. Encode your video in one of these resolutions to make it work best. The maximum file size you for a YouTube video is 128 GB, which is huge and should not be a problem for most uploads.
Verify Your YouTube Account
You have to verify your YouTube account to upload content that’s longer than 15 minutes.
Upload Your Video to YouTube and Add Details
You’re now ready to upload your video! Log in to your YouTube account and click the camcorder icon at the top of the screen to start the upload process. Depending on the size of your video file, the process may be quick or slow. While you’re waiting, you can enter information about your video such as the title, description, thumbnail, and more. The more information you include, the easier it will be for people to find your video. You can also add promotional elements directly from YouTube to your video.
Share Your YouTube Video
Once your video is uploaded to YouTube, you can share it by emailing the video link to email recipients or embedding it on your website or blog. If you want to keep your video private, you can do that, too. You can also put your videos into playlists for an easy way to categorize them and even share multiple productions at the same time.
