Making YouTube clips with AVIDemux

Youtube clips are probably the best way of offering a sample of a movie - rather than a sample of the quality, as most releases get, usually on CG it's more appropriate to offer a sample of the actual content of the movie - and a movie says more than a thousand pictures, unless the clip is less than 1000 frames long.

• Open up your video in avidemux. if it asks you to build a VBR time map, let it (this will not affect the actual file in any way, so you should be OK to do this while seeding).

• Find the first frame you want to clip out, hit [, find the last frame, hit ]. You should see the frame numbers of your selections in the bottom right.

• If you have a fast upload speed: keep video and audio on “Copy”. If your upload speed is fairly low, you'll want to reduce the size of the file a bit before uploading it (youtube will do this anyway, so it doesn't matter how big it is when you upload it; youtube will make it roughly the same size anyway). From the video dropbox in the left, select xvid or xvid4, and in configure:

• Encoding Type: Single Pass - Bitrate
• Bitrate: Roughly 320-480
• Motion & Misc - Motion Search - 4 (High)
• VHQ mode - off

There are obviously more advanced settings to tweak, but these are what i've found are the major determinants of filesize - keeping Motion Search on Ultra High and VHQ enabled will make XViD basically ignore your bitrate. If you like you can also re-encode your audio - 128kbps LAME is usually adequate.

• Finally, do File > Save > Save Video and wait, and you're done ;]