Web Video Formats – Getting Past The Confusion

After you have created your video the next thing to think about is what format to save it in. People will often get stuck on this because video editing software can give you a lot of choices and it's not always clear what the differences are.

But there are some rules of thumb you can use when making that choice.

First of all if you are using a high definition (HD) camera or have your project settings on HD, then you can take advantage of the letterbox (16:9) settings on the save/share part of your video software. Otherwise you should look at 4:3 settings.

A great choice for YouTube is to save it as a MOV file. This is actually an Apple standard format but it plays just fine on a PC. The nice thing about the MOV format is that it uses a compression scheme called H.264 which is the latest and greatest method for making video files small while keeping very good quality.

If you only want to place the file on your own site without going through a service like YouTube, you will want to convert it to mp4 or flv. This also requires a bit of technical expertise when you want to deploy the video, as you will also need a "player" file so that you can embed the video. JWPlayer is a popular video player that you can use for your site.

I mentioned mp4 first as it also uses H.264 standard for compression, but is a version that supports "progressive download" which most people refer to as "streaming" video. If your player does not support mp4, then flv is your next best bet.

The video quality will likely not be as good, and the file size will probably be larger, but it is currently the most widely deployed format on the web.