How to cut upload time for You tube?

Question

It took me 3 hours to upload on to my DeskTop and 17 hours for a twenty minute video on You Tube. Is there a quicker way?

Answer 1

The fastest way out of FCPX to YouTube is to Export your video using Current Settings (have your storyline completely rendered first) and using another application to compress the video to H.264, at a reasonable size, to upload to YouTube.
FCPX exports H.264 at its highest quality... that can be anywhere from 17Mbps to over 50Mbps... that means basically, almost NO compression at all. For most accounts, youtube has a size limit anyway, and I'm sure that accounts for most upload failures from FCPX.
Personally, I prefer Quicktime 7 Pro over Compressor. It is *FAR LESS* complicated and yields (from my experience) better results (but I'm probably just blowing the compressor jobs trying to tweak all the particulars.)
YouTube has specific criteria that it *prefers* to receive anyway. They want:
H.264 @ 30fps (or 29.97, since, that IS the real 30fps) optimized for streaming + Fast Start (prepare for streaming) [** 720/60 media is ok... 24fps/25fps -- again: ok but their spedifications outline 30 as prefered.]
Audio in AAC @ 44.1kHz (bitrate is somewhat flexible -- between about 80 and 192 kbps -- I generally use a 160kbps variable bitrate setting)  [PS -- 48kHz is going to be ok -- but keep in mind, if YT finds video it thinks it can do a better job of compressing -- it WILL... if you stay within the guidelines, your video stands a better chance of making it in the condition *you* intended and not sustaining a surprise recompression at their hands.]
YT "recommends" setting the compressor (whatever app you use to encode/transcode) to Best Quality -- but they're going to resize/recompress the video if it's too high a bitrate anyway, so the best thing to do is find your own "comfort zone" and YT's re-compressors will generally leave your video unchanged...
I have found (relatively good) success with 1080/30p (meaning 29.97) @ 4 to 5 Mbps depending... (moving gradients/ high action sequences will require more -- you can get away with up to about 18Mbps -- or about what the average consumer grade camcorder will produce since many of them have direct to youtube upload faciility.) For 720/60 or 30p, you can scale back the bitrate about 1.5 Mbps on the low end (so: about 2.5 - 3 Mbps). [you can judge the difference for SD from the two samples represented above.]  [PS - scaling a 720/60p down to a 30p will not get you a better/smaller file size; and frequently, you'll get just the opposite -- larger!]
You should create about a 5 second clip from the most active part of your video; export it and test compress it at various bitrates and find the lowest bitrate that results in video that is practially indistinguishable from the high quality settings. That will be your target bitrate.
In general, my compressed H.264 videos will be about 10-15% the size of the ProRes export from FCPX. That's a good size to upload to YouTube.
There's one more thing about YouTube (although I don't know if it's still in effect - things might have changed, but I don't take the chance) -- the Player... it has this little control thingy at the bottom... It has been my belief that YT squeezes the playing video vertically slightly to make room for it [this squeezing creates artifacts especially around small text]. To compensate for that, I usually set my Export settings for 1920 x 1062 (and enable Preserve Aspect Ratio by Letterbox [pillarboxing attempts to extend the video back down to 1080 - I want it to maintain the vertical aspect]). I don't think the viewers ever notice the very slight pillarboxing on either side, and all the small text looks considerably better when I do this. You cannot export from FCPX in custom sizes like that; so for my purposes, this process I've just outlined is the one that works best -- for me. YMMV.