Any video youtube duders wanna help me out?

So I recently started doing more editing of videos for youtube rather than just posting up raw footage. My only problem is compressing it before uploading. Usually when I have a finished version from prem pro its gigs. Ive tried a few different video converters but they are pretty unstable and often crash half way through encoding a video. Even if they dont crash the video quality is seriously fucked half the time.

Any advice as to what would be the best way to go about compressing video for youtube with minmal loss of quality would be very helpful

Thanks in advance!

I use adobe premiere and it works really well. It's expensive though.

@rekt_hed: Have you tried HandBrake? It's free and really reliable in my experience. It does a great job of compressing a couple hundred gigs of FRAPS files down to just a handful of gigs. Really useful to do before editing so you don't have huge files lying around.

If you're using Premiere it exports just fine. Just make the settings something appropriate for youtube. In fact, the export function in Premiere has many presets including youtube and vimeo, and they're not a bad place to start.

If you want an external program to convert videos though, just go with MPEG Streamclip, it's pretty much the gold standard.

I haven't worked too much with video production, but here are video converters and compressors I've had good experiences with:

SUPER http://www.filehippo.com/download_super/

Handbrake http://www.filehippo.com/download_handbrake/

WinFF https://code.google.com/p/winff/ (Frontend for FFmpeg, Windows)

Media Converter http://media-converter.sourceforge.net/ (Frontend for FFmpeg, OS X)

These are my Premiere pro export settings for most things:

MP4 h.264 codec, level 3.2, vbr 7 to 11 mbit video, aac 320kb audio.

If something is particularly busy visually, I'll up the bitrate range to something higher.

Looks great.

awesome! Thanks for the replies you guys. Will try out your suggestions today!

@vestigial_man said:

I have tried many. Handbrake with right settings gives best size to quality ratio - better than Premiere CS6 Pro. However it is best to keep files as original as possible during the editing (minimizing data loss) and use hard compression (Handbrake) as last step before youtube upload.